Ivan Lupi
Untimely: Threshold / A Somatic Archeology of Displacement
Echoes of the Present (Workshop)
Untimely: Threshold
This work explores anticipation as something shaped by time and sound within performance. Instead of moving from preparation to performance, the piece stays entirely in the moment of getting ready, making preparation itself the full duration of the work.
The sound environment is formed by incidental noises of readiness—bodies, objects, and technologies coming into alignment before a performance begins. These sounds, usually hidden or ignored, are treated as essential parts of the work rather than as something that comes before it. By remaining in this in-between state, the piece suggests that preparation has its own substance and sense of time. The work ends through an arbitrary interruption, pointing to the external forces that decide when artistic labor is recognized as “performance.”
Photography: Jaehwan Lee
Untimely: A Somatic Archeology of Displacement
Through sustained improvisation the work layers gestures, sounds and objects from different traditions into a single body, creating deliberate collisions that refuse easy harmony. Investigating the perpetual translation occurring in culturally displaced bodies, the work explores identity as an act of continuous improvisation rather than fixed inheritance. What emerges when we stop seeking resolution and instead inhabit the friction, the strangeness, the endless negotiation of belonging nowhere completely?
Photography: Owen Spargo
Echoes in the Present
A two hour long workshop on the potential applications of memory in relation to Live Art practice. The activities are a selection from Lupi’s immersive 3 day long workshop exploring the notion of memory and other correlated topics as resourceful and inspiring tools for live art.
Taking a step away from the realm of ‘ideas’ as they are usually approached and more commonly understood, Lupi focuses instead on embodied manifestations of mnemonic inputs and their surrounding challenges.
How do we approach and handle a memory in order to sublimate it into a coherent and powerful action in live art? What are other useful notions that can work in conjunction with memory and their application in live art?
No matter the nature of individual memories, traumatic, blissful, alienating, fabricated or spontaneous, they all take shape in our very own present moment and they carry the physical power to affect it.
All the activities offered in the workshop target the participants’ outlook to memory, enabling new perspectives through which to experiment future live actions of individual or collaborative kind.
Photography: Petra Mingneau
About the artist
Ivan Lupi is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work has been shown across Europe, North America & Australasia since the early 2000s. With a background that includes a Masters in Queer Studies in Arts and Culture and decades of durational and participatory performances, Lupi’s practice often explores memory, identity, embodiment and the porous relationship between art and life.