Human Landscape

Look, I don’t dance now/I make money moves
Say I don’t gotta dance/I make money move
–Cardi B, Bodak Yellow


The absence of hundreds of miners, black from coal and covered in sweat, is particularly evident for visitors to the pithead bath, the washing and changing rooms at the Hansa coking plant, which has been disused since 1992. Empty cages hang from the ceiling, in which the workers stowed their clean clothes while working. Today, the site of the former coking plant is home to rare plant and animal species that have reoccupied an area formerly devoted to industry. It is an artificial-natural landscape which, like the human body, has been scarred by numerous interventions and transformations. This is the framework in which Alexandra Pirici narrates the body as a territory, becoming governable and regulated, rationalised, subjected to measuring and capturing– from its role in former industrial production to present day’s image and data economies.
Reflecting on the recording and standardisation of movement, the work also attempts to show the moving body as a trace that escapes total capture through a constant possibility to bifurcate, to deviate, to reclaim pleasure, to become relational and elusive. The hologram installed in the Waschkaue imagines a body that is both atomised and composite in relation with a live, human performer that interacts with the holographic image. Using movement, spoken word and music, the dynamic interplay confronts questions about the presence and absence of the body, its physical power and its virtual image as a contemporary means of production of both economic value and poetic meaning.

The live performer complements the work daily at certain times.