How can we make artistic endeavours more sustainable? Or rather: how can the boundaries between culture and nature be blurred? Down to Earth is a physical exploration of the visible and invisible hierarchies between humans and the environment.
Invited by the Weimar performance collective Material Girls, we developed a performative practice that examines the relationship between body, material and space. In a sequence of actions, questions about burden and liberation, entanglement and responsibility are condensed. The process culminates in a gesture of reflection - a confrontation with the consequences of our actions.
Can the cycle be broken? And if so, at what cost?

Within 52 minutes, we hid, searched for and filled small plastic bags with sand, tied them to our limbs and knotted them together. At the point where we were finally crushed by the weight, we picked up the book and quoted a short passage from Dorothea von Hantelmann's essay ‘Eine Praxis der Ankunft. Kunst und ökologisches Denken’. Then we freed ourselves and nailed the sandbag robe to the wall. The performance illustrated how the exploitation of nature inevitably leads to self-exploitation.

Performance: Diana Karle, Anne-Fleur Ising
Production: Material Girls (Celine Loesche, Cora Groß, Stella Dragovic)
place: M BOOKS, Weimar
including thoughts and ideas of: Dorothea von Hantelmann, Bruno Latour, Tino Sehgal