CONTRAPPOSTO | COUNTERPLACE
Kunstmuseum Basel (CH)Swiss Performance Awards
2025
Five performers move through Kunstmuseum Basel, guiding the audience from entrance floor to the underground, bringing forth latent choreographies within the context of the museum’s architecture and collection. For CONTRAPPOSTO│COUNTERPLACE, Izidora I LETHE looks at the oldest public collection in the world as a repository of collective knowledge – including the unaccounted poses, positions and postures therein. As such, LETHE engages the museum as a brittle space where the complexity of history and the present coexist in motion, rest, sound and silence.
Going through bodily compositions from the 17th century to now, the performers quote and “unquote”, tracing how our very intimate movements are collectively constructed – more than we often notice - and how bodies, simultaneously, shake and refuse conventions perpetually. Sculptures and paintings in the collection have been researched in the publication “Die Meisterwerke” (2011) and in-situ, where (all white and male) artists have sculpted that which we still come to understand as ‘masterful’ depictions and phantasmas of “the body”.
Intervening into such generic understanding of “the body”, LETHE unearths such by a cast of carefully selected professional and club-dancers alike. – The performers transform weighty stillness into their very own movement and presence into resonance, weaving poetic reflections on conviviality, vulnerability, and shared endurance and subtle yet continuously circulating resistances.
The false or free translation of “contrapposto” – a term used in sculpture to describe the perfect balancing act in sculpture – here reverberates into “counterplace”. The (un_)balancing act between cultural exposure, protection and construction is temporarily revealed through vulnerable trembling and the fortitude of presence. – A momentary counterplace against the canonical understanding of the poses we all recycle, an antidote to the spectacle-seeking award-setup, and a demand for attention towards what is subtle yet life-giving in a time of escalated speed.