Decomposing- Recomposing: Interview Ahmad Mallah &Rebecca Lillich // Krüger

What did you research during this residency / how did you experience this residency? What did the time at Scheepmakersdijk/Nieuwe Vide give you? 

Having undivided space, time and funding for a longer period gave us space to reflect and collapse, allowing us to respond to a growing wave of emotions we are both experiencing. Being present in one space made us resist fleeing what we were feeling. We have been working across disciplines towards one another, also holding our personal histories and background in a new light within our shared work. This manifested in carpentry, spoken word works with a vocal processor, costume making and large scale installations. Together we also researched new techniques such as photo transfer, live channeling performance with a camcorder and the use of gips. 

Your work entails reflection on collapsing systems, is your work a way of finding hope within this? If yes or no, can you elaborate a bit on why you do what do you? 

Yes and no is perhaps a great encapsulation; yes in that hope seems to be a muscle, a reflex and reaction that we cannot stop, but we have sore muscles. No in that the work is a future fossil, an acknowledgement of the end of things as we know. We cannot resist the gravity of change but our hearts will break during the fall. The current work is a echo of this bittersweet pain and a exploration of emotional weight. 

What does the physicality of your work / the body in your work entail and/or add? 

We are both, in similar and different ways, body artists. Even within the material works the body is insinuated, absent and loud. We build a house we cannot live in, a bed that will not allow us to rest, our video installations use our bodies past performances to react. The body is the only thing that is left and as the industrial superstructure that binds us winds on and on, we are encouraged to be further and further from ourselves. Our work also reverts back to the start, awkward, uncertain and yet clear. 

What can people expect upcoming period (performances/when walking into the exhibition) ? 

As with our previous projects, the physical work will be activated by a performance. This new offering a new foray for us, melding many mediums into an apocalypse cabaret. Similarly this performative activation will be both live and presented as video work, translated temporarily and giving viewers differing experiences. The exhibition will remain open as a material echo of the live moment, certainly its own stand-alone work but constantly insinuating on the absence of what happened before. We hope viewers can feel their own experience within separate pieces as well as within the entire show as a whole. 

You are also entering each others histories and audience will experience yours ass well, in this chaotic playing field as you call it, what do you hope this very physical, but also conceptual work enriches within the viewer?

Translating or communicating experience and identity within this current work is a process of triggers; each of us attempts to get through a day that feels increasingly heavy and futile only to be suddenly effected by a image of family, a image of genocide, a reminder of pleasure or pain; the multidisciplinary works all attempt to share this experience, the heavy temporal nature of now shattered and effected by current events or memories that follow you. Confusion, loneliness, hope, sweetness, these colors fade and shift through the experience.