SOL INVICTUS: Sounds and Performances for the Winter Solstice
A project by Istituto Svizzero
MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome
#Supplement
On Saturday, 16 December, from 7 pm to midnight, MACRO renews its collaboration with the Istituto Svizzero for the Roman stage of SOL INVICTUS: Sounds and Performances for the Winter Solstice, hosting the event celebrating the winter solstice for the second year.
This is the shortest day of the year and by convention, the time to which corresponds, because of the position the Sun has relative to the equator, the longest night and the shortest day. An astronomical event rich in symbolic meanings – sometimes even controversial – that was celebrated in antiquity by pagan populations before the advent of Christianity: the Romans, celebrated Sol Invictus, the Egyptians the birth of Horus, the Greeks worshipped Helios. After the prevailing hours of winter darkness, the Sun seemed to be reborn and became invincible (from Latin Sol Invictus). A time of year that, ancestrally, marks the passage from darkness to light. And it is precisely to the search for light, for the divine that is in the air, for the myth and the beauty of nature that Istituto Svizzero revolves these three evenings of movement and sound experimentation.
The programme, curated by Gioia Dal Molin, develops through performance, movement, sound and light. Throughout the evening the performances by Francesca Sproccati, Katja Schenker, Tiran Willemse, Madison Bycroft & Louise BSX will alternate with sound interventions with Jessica Khazrik’s live set.
Francesca Sproccati, Out of Me, Inside You, 40’
Katja Schenker, dress, 20’
Tiran Willemse, blackmilk, 45’
Madison Bycroft & Louise BSX
Hybrid set: Jessika Khazrik, Concurrence, 60’
Free entry.
Booking is recommended, register here.
FRANCESCA SPROCCATI an artist active in the field of performing arts. She creates scenic installations that become contemplative environments in which sound, matter and sensation stimulate and enhance the dimension of listening and give space to the encounter between bodies-matter beyond the performance itself. With her works she stages a fragile and unresolved space, leaving it up to the audience to complete it. She is co-creator of the movement TIB – Ticino is Burning.
KATJA SCHENKER lives and works in Zurich. Her artistic works focus on the areas of live performance, drawing, sculpture and installations in internal and external spaces, highlighting the use of natural materials in most cases. The sensuality of these materials play an important role, as do their context, as well as their spatial and temporal dimensions, such as mass, permeability or perishability. Schenker’s artworks aim to thereby heighten the experience and perception of one’s own corporeality in relation to the bodies of the audience and that of the artist. In her processes, concepts such as skin, openness and hold play an important role. She has received among others the Swiss Art Award three times, as well as the Swiss Performance Art Award and in 2021 the St. Gallen Cultural Foundation’s ‘Recognition Prize’. Katja Schenker studied comparative literature, art history and philosophy at the University of Zurich and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
TIRAN WILLEMSE is a dancer, choreographer and researcher from South-Africa based in Zurich. Their performance based practice is rooted in a careful attention to space, imagination, gesture and sound, focusing on how they relate to the ways in which construction of race and gender are performed, communicated and challenged. They’re is artist in residence at Gessnerallee in Zürich and their work continues touring internationally.
MADISON BYCROFT is an artist born in Tarntanya (Adelaide, Australia), and currently working in Marseille, France. Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia (2013), and the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016). Working with video, sculpture and performance, Madison Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, expression, and refusal. The politics of illegibility and legibility are explored through language and material, asking how ‘sense’ is framed by historical contexts, biases, and structures of power. They are interested in how we might re-imagine ‘reading’ (in its expanded sense) and understanding, not as goal-oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and makes space: opaque, never arriving, ungrounded, and floating.
LOUISE BSX is a musical artist and technician living and working in Paris, France. She studied sound at the École nationale supérieure Louis Lumière before starting her musical career as an interpreter, author, and producer. She collaborates with artist Thx4Crying by producing several of her singles and her EP Montagne d’Emeraude. She is involved in filmmaking as a sound designer, editor and mixer, notably on Alice Michaud’s Song of the Standing Dead, Antoine Mayet’s A la mer sans Camille and Gio Ventura’s Sports Xtrem. She also works as a technician at La Flèche d’Or in Paris.
Astrophysical, hyperbodily and alchemical, JESSICA KHAZRIK’s live musical practice is deeply devoted to communal solace, collective transcendence and trans-generational healing. With genre-defying mercurial treatments of voice, drums and space, her sonic scapes intimately investigate the ecological and techno-political premises of continua we inhabit, co-create or forget. Concocting scores from trans-millennial compendia of healing, space and biosensing technologies and on-site/online detritus, her live and hybrid sets are deeply informed by ancestral chanting traditions – like Armenian sharakan, Levantine mawwal and Iraqi radh – skewed with a quaint techno and incomputable entrancing rhythms.