Anita Kaya

»Humanity and non-humanity have always performed an intricate dance with each other. There was never a time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding network of humanity and non humanity; today this mingeling has become harder to ignore.«¹

I am engaged in the human relationship with things. With those superfluous things we surround ourselves with, which accumulate to heaps and – seemingly through no fault of our own – sediment in our houses, landscapes, and bodies.

How did they ever get there?

Into the flat here, apartment 22. A store.

A sleeping place of intractably piled-up things. Materials, stacked, stratified, everyday things and documents that have lost meaning but still have an effect. An accretion, an agglomeration, a body. Monstrous. Resistant. A sleeping dragon, like a white spot on the map, a terrain yet to be explored.

The things, as a memory against forgetting, press forward, making themselves heard. I want to follow their call, practise my hearing, listen to the polyphony. Follow the traces in between, the connecting lines. Overlays. Stories. Past matters. Everyday things. Fiction.

The things touch. Stir. Start flowing. Where do they want to move to, find themselves in other places and other meetings? Organise themselves, change, compress, archive, ...? What becomes apparent in the necessity of relocating things, their re-transfer, re-appropriation as impetus for an artistic research?

 

ANITA KAYA (AT) is a freelance choreographer, performer and net worker, based in Vienna. She studied experimental theatre in Vienna at the Dramatisches Zentrum Wien, contemporary dance in Vienna, Germany, Italy and New York (study grant BMUKK) and Movement Analysis and Notation at the Austrian Society for Dance Therapy.

Since 1984 she has been working as a dancer / performer / choreographer in dance and theatre productions, among others directed by Ruben Fraga and Nigel Charnock, and was co-founder and member of several theatre and dance collectives, such as Damenimprovisation und Herren-BIGbäng. Under the label OYA-Produktion (1988–2005) she created as artistic director, choreographer and dancer twelve feature-length dance productions, numerous (site-specific) performances, installations and two dance videos in artistic cooperation with artists from various fields, performed at festivals and venues in Austria, Mexico, France, Italy, Finland, Germany, Hungary, USA/New York.

In 2000 she co-initiated the artists-for-artists association Im_flieger, and in her function as artistic director in collaboration with other artists is developing new core concepts and structures of artistic cooperation: e.g., the European residency program for young choreographers TERRAINS FERTILES 05 (Bucharest/Vienna/Paris) which was awarded the innovation prize 2005 by IG-Kultur Wien; the international exchange program CHANGING SPACES, and the transmedial CROSSBREEDS Platform at the interface of performing and visual arts.

Anita Kaya is engaged in the body as a store of individual and collective memory, in transdisciplinary formats, and in the social aspects and practices of choreography as performative order of space, body and materials. Her last works were realized in transmedial collaborative settings and (performative) installations, and mainly positioned at the interface of (dance) history, archiving, installation and performance. (LIVING ARCHIVE)

¹ Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 2010