Aerocene at Nextones Festival in Italy

On July 27th and 28th Aerocene community member Lorenzo Malloni carried out a 2-day workshop: 26 Steps to be On Air during the Nextones Festival in the Val d’ Ossola, Italy.

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Using inexpensive Do-It-Together techniques, the workshop’s twelve participants built two enourmous Tetro Aerosolar sculptures, that were later flown to excellent conditions. About the recent workshop, Lorenzo recalls: “We strictly followed the Aerocene sculpture construction method, including corner reinforcements and an inflation opening with velcro stripes”.

On the third day the participants were able to fly the sculptures collectively built. During the first half hour the wind was very low providing almost ideal conditions, and the sculptures took only five minutes to become buoyant. In Lorenzo’s words: “The alpine air was fresh and chill and the summer sun did the rest”.

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Aerocene seeks to change how people relate to the world in environmental, social, and political terms. To build, and to design the sculpture is to engage participants in practices of thinking-through-making and collaborative action, triggering imagination and creativity, and spreading knowledge about solar balloon flights, thermodynamic physics, meteorological science and art practices through a multidisciplinary approach.⁠

Nextones project for “A Theatre of Stone in Nature” stands out as an example of architectural and landscape design which draws on the natural context and the industrial archeology of the location, thus ensuring the continuation of a narrative and enabling future generations to actively experience these spaces and also to contribute to their transformation.

Picture credits: Piercarlo Quecchia / DSL Studio

Aerosolar Arentsz and Rummelsberg flight

Within the Aerocene movement, different Possible Future(s) are envisioned and discussed: shared, pollution-free, solidary, socially and environmentally sustainable futures. But in this case we highlight a vision of an Aero Solar past brought forward by Aerocene Community member Irina Bogdan @irinambogdan

Inspired by the poetic aerosolar flights free from carbon emissions that took place on top of the frozen Rummelsburg lake in Berlin in February 2021, she went on to create a collage mixing Aerocene Sculptures and Arent Arentsz oil painting “Skaters on the Amstel”, made in Belgium in 1620.

On the occasion of the Rummelsberg flights last year an Aerocene Community member Lorenzo Malloni @malloni.lorenzo wrote: “As soon as the black Aerosolar sculptures get inflated on the ice with only air, the power of the sun lifts them off instantaneously – amplified by the albedo reflection effect on the white, frosty lake. Immediately, their movements in the thin air generate a focal point attracting the public and participants onto the wide white stage”.

But rather than keep us in the past, this vision may propel us into devising new Possible Future(s):
How to cool down the planet and foster a new sensitivity towards it?
How to explore without exploitation?
How to subvert the fossil fuels regime with the one of the Sun?

Under My Gaze

We are happy to invite the worldwide Aerocene Community, but especially those in Berlin, to the Under My Gaze aerosolar dance performance, by Renae Shadler and her collaborators together with Aerocene.

“The Sun gazes upon the Earth, creating and destroying life, the engine on which our ecosystems depend. Under my gaze is a ritual for our times, where bodies and voices pulse with the gravitational pull and combustive power of this solar giant, tracing the Sun’s movements through limb and skin, through reflection and darkness. Bodies and voices pulse with the gravitational pull and combustive power of this solar giant, tracing the Sun’s movements through limb and skin, through reflection and darkness.

Under my Gaze is a quartet performed by three people and the Aerocene sculpture that gives a body to the unseen forces that surround us: connecting Earth-bound dancers to aerial and cosmic worlds in a transforming landscape of shadowy creatures and molten forms.

The dancers explore ways to see the Sun without eyes, learning from other creatures – phototropic plants, hydra that sense light with their tentacles. The audience bears witness to this fierce and at times delicate interplay of force and form, tuning in via headphones to the rhythmic stomps and ethereal flight.

Under my Gaze proposes a new poetics of movement fuelled not by fossilised energy, but by the gaze of the Sun itself; moving with – rather than extracting from – the often invisible forces that stir and surround us.”

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As we learn to attune to the weather to adapt to new climates, the performance is weather dependent.

Under my Gaze
28-31. July 2022 / 11.30-12.45hr
St. Elisabeth Kirche, Invalidenstraße 4A, 10115 Berlin

The perfomance is open to everyone!
Purchasing a ticket grants you the experience of an audio soundtrack via wireless headphones.

More information: http://renaeshadler.com/undermygaze/

TEAM
Concept, Choreography, Performance: Renae Shadler | Performance: Mickey Mahar, Dorota Michalak | Composition: Samuel Hertz | Set design: Camille Lacadee | Costume design: Geraldine Arnold | Dramaturgy: Ally Bisshop, Maikon K | Production, Distribution: Dörte Wolter | Production assistant: Undine Sommers | Photos: Piotr Pietrus | Video: Camille Lacadee | Inspired by Susurrus group, 2017-2020: Samuel Hertz, Maria Nurmela, Kalle Ropponen, Renae Shadler

Presented by Renae Shadler & Collaborators in collaboration with Aerocene Foundation. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR.