GLITCH INTO THE CHASM
“[c]haos remains as a fissure, or gap, in the abyss of all existence…at once yawning chasm and opening…” Emmanuel Falque, 2016
A site-specific performance and installation, that stages a painted pyroclastic cloud—catastrophic, amorphous, immense—as the backdrop for a choreographed act of falling. Presented across three venues marked by ecological disruption and social precarity—both hidden and exposed—the project intertwines AI-generated imagery, principles of painting, and bodily movement.
Glitch into the Chasm is a video tableau of a continuous site-specific performance that moves along a fluvial line of ecological vulnerability, staging a painted pyroclastic cloud—catastrophic, amorphous, poisonous—as the backdrop for a choreographed act of falling. Part of the larger filmic assemblage Shaken Grounds, Shifting Skies, the scene restages the leap of the mythic Roman figure Marcus Curtius, whose descent into a sacrificial void recurs throughout art history.
The chasm is imagined as entering an uncanny valley where inside and outside collapse. Here, it is not an end but a threshold: an unstable socio-ecological zone of transformation where bodies, myths, and mutant environments decay into each other. As Timothy Morton writes:
“This is what ecological awareness means, not some pleasant hippy utopia or healthy paradise, but a charnel ground, a bardo (the interstitial realm between lives in Tibetan Buddhism), a valley between illusory peaks.”
(Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, 2013)
Lucie Strecker in collaboration with Shaken Grounds
Artists:
Nicolas Freytag is a painter who explores questions of tradition in the history of art in relation to new forms of image production. The sources and media he uses in his examinations of analogies and distortions—particularly in the posture of figures and the unfolding of landscapes—are heterogeneous, while his compositions employ the approach of stratification. He has exhibited in London, Paris, Geneva, and at the Sharjah Biennial.
Lucie Strecker is an artist, performer, and researcher with a focus on experimental systems within performance art. She considers microperformativity in combination with mythology as a way to question human levels of perception––both spatial and temporal—emphasizing biological and technological micro-agencies in relation to art and history. Works have been shown i.a. at Tanzquartier Vienna, Impulse Festival, Düsseldorf, the House of World Cultures, Berlin, the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, the Bemis Center, Omaha, the MAK, the 21er Haus, Vienna, the MAXXI Museum for Contemporary Art Rome.
