kiana rezvani, born in west Iran and based in Berlin, is an artist, choreographer and researcher developing choreographic and performative formats that blend dance, text, video and voice. kiana’s continuous research revolves around histories and narratives that are forgotten, untold, concealed and suppressed. Weaving together personal and collective memories and finding distinct parallels and intersections, kiana’s works craft new relations and realms of possibility, critically examining colonial and imperial constructs, and thereby creating a space for poetic resilience.

kiana’s research at Radialsystem takes a deeper look at our modes of relation to body and land. While reflecting on questions of ownership, be/longing and otherness and holding space for remembering, it asks: can we radicalize our imagination of the future? How can choreography bring movement to the unmovable, to the rigid? How can it bring liquidity into our thinking and existing? The project is a tender recalling of our struggle, a gap in existing in the ways which have been prescribed to us. A pause to locate ourselves and understand what we can bring to this moment of normalized crisis and violence.

Artistic direction and performance kiana rezvani
Performer and co-creator  Elvan Tekin und jee chan
Choreographic dialogue  Ewa Dziarnowska
Space and things  stefan pente

During her residency, Berlin-based Mexican artist and producer Valeria Oviedo explores the origins and powerful effects of conflict through an artistic-experimental engagement with combative and theatrical movements and expressions. The traditional Mexican version of ‘Wrestling Lucha Libre’, which combines martial, acrobatic and performative elements, serves as a foil for examining fights shaped by the body. Humour and playfulness, as well as resistance and friction, play particularly important roles for the artist.

Together with other performers, with musician Emme Moises, and in exchange with her chosen dialogue partners, the artist also investigates concepts and techniques of mindfulness and meditation to better understand the state of the body and mind in moments of conflict. Her work is based on the conviction that conflicts need to be considered both from the inside and the outside – along the lines of “Otherness”.

Valeria Oviedo is an interdisciplinary artist and producer from Tijuana, Mexico. Her work focuses on choreography, media art and performance and deals with themes such as borders, origins, the role of women as well as mourning and death. Through her works, she always tries to create a connection with the audience – regardless of whether they have an existing relationship with art or not. Since 2020, Valeria Oviedo has been working and living in Berlin, where she offers guided meditations and mindful movement exercises. Most recently, she developed the production “Los Malos Hábitos” as part of the Research Residency at ada Studio für zeitgenössischen Tanz in Berlin.

Showing

Towards the end of her Body Time Space residency at Radialsystem, Valeria Oviedo will present the current stage of her performance “FEISTY” in a showing followed by an artist talk. 

Sat   14 09 2024   6 pm

Berlin-based Italian artist Frida Giulia Franceschini has been working on a new performance with sound designer Sophie Vitelli as part of her Body Time Space residency. "The Night" (working title) explores through movement and text the painful spectacle that shaped Italian television during the Berlusconi era: for decades, the female body was instrumentalised and exploited. Together with other performers and musicians, Frida Giulia Franceschini investigates how the portrayals that dominated Italian suppertime for years now continue to ‘inhabit’ bodies. Franceschini studies the stories and identities that circulate in this world, as well as the fictional narratives and social discourses. The night serves as an imaginary place that connects dreams and nightmares, sense and nonsense, and infatuation and horror.

Frida Giulia Franceschini is a dancer and performance artist based in Berlin. With a background in visual art, acrobatics and contemporary dance, from 2012 to today Frida has been collaborating and working as a freelance performer for various artists and choreographers. She has created three stage performances: "Baby", "Three Little Rooms" and "Tricks for gold". With the eponymous title, she presented a short film in 2022, co-created and co-directed with Sophie Vitelli. 

Choreography & performance   Frida Giulia Franceschini  
Co direction, sound design & music  Sophie Vitelli 
Performance  Emil Ertl und Simo Vassinen  
Performance & movement research   Viktoria Andersson  

Kasia Wolinska is a dancer, choreographer and writer. In her artistic practice deals with political and historic dimensions of dancing, studying both theory and discourses. But first and foremost, her practice centres around techniques and methods of moving, positioning her own dancing body as a continuously transforming composite of forms, sensations, affects and stories. She believes in the value of transnational and interspecies solidarity; in dancing as a practice of knowledge and resistance; and in the necessity of a perpetual socialist and feminist struggle for the sake of collective liberation and realization of the post-war utopia. Kasia Wolinska also dedicated herself to developing discourse and methods around good work culture in dance, which is an ongoing process of critical reflection and practice in the Berlin scene and beyond. She is currently a proud member of the systering collective.

During the residency at Radialsystem she engages with the realm of religion and dance: an attempt to experience the movement of spirits, to touch the sacred space and time, and to rejuvenate her relation to dancing beyond the demands of the art market and towards an act of dancing as communion – with the whole of oneself and the worlds of others. Departing from the iconic Pink Floyd concert at Pompeii (1972) and Los Jaivas concert at Machu Picchu (1981), and together with invited scholars, dramaturges, artists and spiritual practitioners, she dives into the space where sound and movement intermingle, incite transgressions, and allow for joy, rage and mourning.

Open Body Practice

During the last week of her Body Time Space residency at Radialsystem, Kasia Wolinska invites movement practitioners to two morning sessions which will be centred around her tireless interest in dancing and its technical, sensorial, historical, and spiritual dimensions.

Tue   05 12 2023   10–12 h
Wed  06 12 2023   10–12 h

The Mexican choreographer and dancer Ixchel Mendoza Hernández has lived and worked in Berlin since 2007. Her research is based on a phenomenon she calls ‘Visual Ghost’, a consciousness of perception that continuously transforms or evolves: Living in a world in which the materialized and visible are intertwined with the immaterial and the invisible, ‘Visual Ghost’ explores how the invisible and immaterial can come into presence by experiencing them. Through the means of choreography, she explores a consciousness that materializes in space.

Her research during the Body Time Space residency at Radialsystem focuses on emotional practices and the agency of touch and connection through the intimate relations between three performers. Through skin-to-skin explorations and deep embodiment of emotions, the aim is to reflect upon power relations and expand upon this perspective to analyse power structures through the lens of intersecting social divisions, such as racialization, gender, and sexuality, and the complex web of relationships between humans, nature, and the universe. By choreographing relations, her interest is to interweave the personal and the mutual, the individual and the social, exploring the transformative potential of touch and reflecting upon how we shape and are shaped through one another.

Ixchel Mendoza Hernández studied choreography and dance at the ArtEZ University of the Arts Arnhem and in the SoDA program at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz – HZT Berlin. Her work has been presented at numerous venues and festivals. As a dancer and performer, she has worked with Susanne Kennedy, with whom she recently collaborated, creating the choreographic material for re-staging the opera “Einstein on the Beach”, which premiered in Basel in 2022. Ixchel’s current choreographic works include “THE TWOFOLD PARADOX” (2018), “The Reversed Alchemist: Figure 4-6” (2021), and “THE MULTIPLICITY OF THE OTHER”, which will premiere in November 2023 in Berlin.

Residency  Ixchel Mendoza Hernández
Research together with  Dora Đurkesac, Hyewon Suk, Maika Knoblich, Joséphine Evrard, Roger Salar Reyner and Sebastian Elias Kurth

Argentine dancer and choreographer Rocio Marano has been awarded a residency in Radialsystem's programme "Body Time Space" for October 2022. Her artistic research focuses on traditional Argentine dance, challenging Western attributions such as those assigned to folklore, as well as related aesthetic paradigms of contemporary academic dance. Her residency allows her to explore "Latinfuturism" and its notion of time, a theory that is suspicious of the idea of a glorious future realised through acceleration and progress.

Building on her last work "Matria", Marano also deepens her exploration of Malambo – a traditional Argentine gaucho dance form that emerged during the colonial "conquest" of the Wallpampu desert. Within a performative approach, Marano's interest lies in bringing opposites into contact with one another in space and time. Using VR technologies and 360° cameras, she explores the artistic and aesthetic dimensions of such spatiotemporal points of contact.

The workshop Matria – Motherland marks the end of the residency period.

Videointerview Rocío Marano

As part of her "Body Time Space" residency at Radialsystem, Kianí del Valle is developing the concept of "Mujer Pulpo" ("Octopus Woman"). Through a dialogue between dance and film, the Berlin-based Puerto Rican dancer, choreographer, director and performance curator explores the biographies of eight women forgotten by history; in Radialsystem she focusses on German postmodern dancer, choreographer and dance teacher Mary Wigman, and US-American performance artist Carolee Schneemann. Each solo features a live performance and film, developed in collaboration with various music producers and filmmakers, and is the point of departure for the "Mujer Pulpo" project to eventually become a "cinematheque".

Kianí del Valle is the founder and choreographer of the KDV DANCE ENSEMBLE in Berlin. Her work has been shown at such arts organisations as the Barbican in London, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York City. Her recent work explores historical Caribbean narratives within the context of postcolonial realities and indigenous Taíno culture.

Videointerview mit Kianí del Valle

Following its successful inaugural year at Radialsystem in 2020, the residency programme "Body Time Space" is expanding: in cooperation with the Institut français, "Corps Espace Temps" is a programme aimed specifically at dance practitioners from France. The diverse dance scene boasted by France is hardly visible in Berlin due to a lack of funding for touring performances. The "Corps Espace Temps" residency at Radialsystem closes this gap, as France-based dance practitioners are given a platform and can enter into dialogue with artists from Berlin's independent scene. The first to participate is choreographer Pol Pi, who, together with musicians from the soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop, will deepen and further develop his artistic focus over a two-week research period.

Pol Pi is a transmasculine choreographer and performer from Brazil who has resided in France since 2013. His work revolves around questions of memory, translation and the notion of archive in dance. During his residency at Radialsystem, he and cellist Sophie Notte will explore the tensions and energies that seize and flow through a person's body when playing an instrument, and how this intensity can be translated into movement and dance. Pol Pi's work has been performed internationally; his most recent works include "beauty is accessory" (2021), "daté-e-s" (2020) and "Me too, Galatée" (2018).

Videointerview Pol Pi

Touch, closeness, togetherness – a choreographic-performative exploration of the practice of touch: During his residency at Radialsystem, André Uerba explores the different dimensions of touch – its properties, qualities and complexities. Through movement, ritardando and focus on the body, he and his co-residents test out different forms of becoming acquainted with and sensing one another as a means to uncover the potential of togetherness. He thus continues his examination of the topic of touch, which he embarked upon in 2018. André Uerba studied solo/dance/authorship at HZT Berlin (Inter-University Centre for Dance) and photography at Ar.Co Lisbon. He was awarded early career funding from the Berlin Senate in 2018 for his piece “Burn Time”, which he presented at Radialsystem in 2020 and elsewhere. Uerba has been part of the project “Re-Think (Accessibility & Sustainable Mobility)” since 2021.

Videointerview André Uerba

Fimpresentation André Uerba

Her artistic interest lies in the observation of the body as a moving archive – as a conveyor of cultural experiences and memories in the relationship between tradition and contemporaneity, individual memory and cultural remembrance, mobility and homeland. The impetus for her work is her own experience of diaspora, which she reflects corporeally in dance. Together with co-resident Natsuko Tezuka, she explores the ‘diasporic’ body as a potential new form of cultural practice. Jee-Ae Lim studied traditional Korean dance in Seoul and completed her master’s degree in Solo/Dance/Authorship at HZT Berlin. In 2014 she was voted ‘Hoffnungsträgerin’ (‘Promising Artist’) in the Tanz Magazine Year in Review issue as well as ‘Young Leading Artist 2015’ by Gaeksuk Magazine. Between 2017 and 2020 she received several grants from the Berlin Senate and the Arts Council Korea.

Videointerview Jee-Ae Lim and Natsuko Tezuka

StudioVisit Jee-Ae Lim and Natsuko Tezuka

Lina Gómez’s unique brand of choreography is characterised by uncompromising engagement with the body, a strong sense of form, and the merging of diverse movement traditions stemming from different cultural contexts. The relationship between music and dance that is intricately carved out in her pieces enables a new contemporary view of what ‘music theatre’ could mean beyond the conventions of the genre. The Colombian-born choreographer, dancer and movement teacher studied dance and theatre in Sao Paulo/Brazil and Berlin. Her ensemble piece ‘A Passo di Mulo’ (2018) was awarded funding by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. As a dancer and performer, Lina Gómez works with Tino Sehgal, Yoshiko Chuma, Edson Fernandes and Jorge Garcia, among others.

Videointerview Lina Gómez