KUDERA + MPEARSONATER ongoing collaboration between garment designer and textile artist Alena Kudera + dancer and performance maker Mary Pearson.
By ‘wearing the consequences’ of consumer capitalism, we embody a felt response to environmental crisis.
The work in progress is an immersive performance installation and a space for contemplation on the predicament of humanity as entangled animals.
Episode ii: What Have We Become?
KUDERA's second collection of wearable sculptures made from waste materials is playful and sinister; more intense in volume and scale.
It obscures the human body, weighs it down, heats it up, and limits some senses to enhance others. Dancers disappear into piles of rubbish and appear as mythical sentient creatures or high fashion silhouettes.
A 2023 research period funded by Arts Council England 'Developing Your Creative Practice' invited creative technologists to build immersive 'digital habitats'.
Electro-acoustic musician Caterina McEvoy uses ambisonic mic set-up and environmental field recordings to create soundscape compositions with ‘live looping’ in response to the dancers' movement.
Multimedia artist + production designer Noel Jones creates live responsive visuals with sensors and projection mapping.
Alongside dance makers Amy Voris and Laura Doehler, Pearson uses somatic psychology frameworks (Somatic Experiencing®, Authentic Movement, Experiential Anatomy) to explore the meeting of materials between human animal bodies and human-made consumer waste.
episode ii
What Have We Become?
2022
May - June 2022
Lake Studios Berlin
Residency culminating in a studio work-in-progress performance
July 2022
CI@50 Festival, Oberlin Ohio, USA
2023
Arts Council England 'Developing Your Creative Practice'
grant research period at 24 Hope Street
2024
Dec 11th
Artlab at Oh! Design Foundation, Chester
2025
April 4th
Turn produced by hÅb; at Contact Theatre, Manchester
May 3rd
Digital Moves, commissioned for Leap Festival, Liverpool
I am the discarded
What you discarded, we discarded
Cast off, thrown away, used,
Consumed
No longer having value, I’m still here
I exist whether you see me or not
As if I have my own life
I float and sink, gather together, unfold, wait, accumulate
Get dirty, get old
Get buried.
Crushed, covered, collected, sold
Removed
As if a plastic bag could kill me
I would suffocate in bliss, not even notice I was dying I was experiencing so much pleasure
As if otherwise I would float away
As if the wind would carry me
As if my body needed reminding it was there
As if nobody cared, as if anybody cared, as if there is no time to care.
As if care equals stuff.
As if stuff does not have a past or a future.
As if the user is using and being used and the use consumes us
until the sole of a foot becomes just a memory of a distant planet
-Mary Pearson and Anne Gaëlle Thiriot