YGRG16X: Death by Landscape is an ambitious and extended serial project that started in Autumn 2019. It stems from the ongoing YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (YGRG) research taking from it a serial and fragmented form and collective reading as narrative trigger. This new work is a sensual architecture of bodies, spaces, images, light, sound and objects that serves as a base structure for a poetic essay extended through time, location and media. YGRG16X: Death by Landscape will take many forms — from experimental video, to cinematographic performances; teleplay recorded in front of a live audience and within the exhibition setting; disparate sculptural objects, props and costume exhibited independently or in empty sets - all contributing to a fragmented and dispersed work that will be on display until Autumn 2020.
According to Donna Haraway, embodiment is not about fixed location in a reified body, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. YGRG16X: Death by Landscape will be looking deeply into embodiment, place, sexuality, temporality, integrity and breakdown - the topics that are continuously explore by YGRG. This project contextualises the instability of boundaries that renders the reading and performing body and its surroundings as the site of an active and ongoing set of relations, positing the interdependence of the text, the body, the movement, the environment and the technology.
Fragmented in its form, YGRG16X: Death by Landscape is a hybrid project resisting an integrity expected of an artwork, striving for a fragmentariness rather than holism. Aesthetically, it is rooted in the low budget b-horror and experimental film from Eastern Europe, and explores the format of a teleplay horror-mocumentary superimposed onto the gallery space. Conceptually the project explores the horror that is attributed to being outside (of norm, society, etc.), which is inherently part of queer experience. Beginning with the Gothic novel, horror allowed the writer to express her desires under the guise of fiction, yet riddled with anxiety of being separated from society. Developing the ideas for this project the artists have been influenced by such writers as U. K. Le Guin, A. Richter, D. Haraway, O. Tokarczuk, O.Butler, J. Kristeva, M. Mendes and T. Morton, and their non-binary understanding of the world. In view of the contemporary ecological anxiety, Gaweda and Kulbokaitė strongly believe that thinking through the queer experience can offer ways to renegotiate our complex relationshipto ‘Nature’, which has historically been defined as separate to ourselves - as outside.
With YGRG16X: Death by Landscape the artists are interested in evoking the eerie which itself is a haunting presence of a monstrosity that doesn’t amount to a single identifiable moment of fear or source of horror, but rather is a prolonged experience of dread.
The production of the film was initiated in January 2019 during a residency at NKDale in Norway, including the preliminary writing of the script and planning of the storyboard. A significant portion of the video material was also collected there - including shots of the winter landscape, forrest scenes, both shots of detail and atmospheric scenes - all using a 360° camera.
In its presentation at the OnCurating project space in Zurich in May and June 2020, YGRG16X: Death by Landscape will take shape of a choreographic performance and a four week exhibition. The performance will be executed by dancers and will be created in collaboration with a choreographer. This will add yet another layer to the multi-facetted work of YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP emphasising movement of the mind and the body and facilitating the idea of reding through movement and dance. This opening performance will take place in an installation of probs and costumes previously used for the videos of YGRG16X: Death by Landscape. The performance will be filmed and the performance video will be on display over the course of the exhibition. This way the artists emphasise the dichotomy between presence and absence.