15 Feb The Good Heart
In collaboration with Rachela Abbate, SQx is creating a new interdisciplinary ballet called, The Good Heart. Production will begin in Italy in the summer of 2019. Rachela will then join SQx in Canada later in the year to complete the project.
Rachela Abbate
Rachela is an Italo-German multimedia artist, cultural producer, and curator. She studied philosophy, dance and music in Germany and Fine Arts in Italy and graduated in visual arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna with a master degree.
Her work investigates the significance of architected spaces – in particular, intangible structures in communication or archiving. In her artistic work, which includes photography, installation, video, and drawing, she explores aesthetic imaginaries, which open up possibilities of reflection and transformation.
In regard to architecture and communication, she have worked for Joseph Kosuth in Germany and Sol LeWitt in Italy. The diverse studies in relation to architecture as space in communication was deepened during residencies at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah and Decolonizing Architecture in Beith Sahour both in the West Bank, where she investigated on architecture as warfare and in decolonization; and the project on which she participated was shown at the Istanbul Biennale. Still in the West Bank, she was one of the co-founder of Bait al Karama (“House of Dignity”) the first women center in the old city of Nablus combining a culinary social enterprise with cultural activities.
One of her public art works was awarded during the Sea Art Festival – Busan Biennale in South Korea, 2013. Next to exhibitions in Italy and abroad, her work was been displayed during the Venice Biennale 2015.
Recently, she started an interdisciplinary project, Imperatives-Civil Disobedience – after 45, reflecting on necessities of political activity and thinking in societies.
Her approach for making art lays on processing, mainly of research and experiences and is realized in participatory, curatorial, and platform projects; writing; and in art production in varied media.
With the years, Rachela has specialized in architectures of communication bringing together decades-long work on the visual aspects of text, coding, and writing practice with qualities of knowledge communication. She has developed a unique method and artistic expression, combining sociopolitical and philosophical content and forms of its communication, convincing the audience to overtake a critical position to used ways of processing information. Differentiation of functions of communication and expressions is needed as digital information and communication technologies risks physical and social integrity next to its positive characteristics.
The Good Heart: A Dance Performance in 3 Parts
I A Good Heart
II Resistance
III Aufhebung – Tryptic
Resistance as a socio-political activity is a modern understatement a form of disobedience or opposition, refusing injustice or other ethical absence and advocating policies and principles in the natural and social realms.
Resistance can have different forms and expressions from violent to non-harming activities. At the core of The Good Heart is the idea of resistance as a possibility of regeneration and transcendence. Awareness, recognition, as well as empathy, are conditions of knowledge and transformation, going beyond dichotomy and conflict. This attitude in resistance could be characterized as female and is inherent in all human beings. Its characteristics are often represented with the symbol of the heart, in its cultural/religious and physical meanings of connectivity, care and cure, sharing, creation, transcendence.
We structured the work in three units whereby the third unit has three parts itself. By the German word Aufhebung is given the complex definition of the “good heart” as the meaning of this word is threefold: 1) preserve, conserve; 2) abolish, suspend 3) transcend, sublate.
I The Good Heart: the female heart and its connectivity to Earth and the “other,” being in flow, being in rhythm, horizontal organization and structure
II Resistance: expression, activity, the female body –female psyche, creation and recreation, endure in the opposites, the struggle, the insight
III Aufhebung – Tryptic: preserve –abolish–transcend
Aspects: Heart’s quality: Fire, Heart’s form: Spirit, Heart’s movement: beats, rhythmic, Heart’s direction: regeneration, Heart’s shape: triangle
Instead of thinking qualities or activities as dichotomy of inside and outside, we see the heart – like the dance – between presence and absence, in balance between the collapses of the movement which depends on time and space.
