SWITCHOVER 2024 | Maria Metsalu "Kultuur"

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Kultuur contemplates the Sun. Performance not as thesis but as experience – something between a piano concert and a finger-painted surface.
The Sun radiates energy. The Sun might nurture life, or burn right through it. Metsalu gathers herself on the orbit of this duality.
Kultuur accommodates chaos and rejects it. Intensities vary between states of pleasure, indifference, suffering and hope for renewal.
Metsalu displays herself as an object of spectacle, then denies the spectacle. We face Kultuur as an audience, a collective body. This body will be fed, entertained and challenged.
The performance is divided into three baroque and splendorous movements – the parade at the hot dog cart, the concert of the Flower and the final consumption of the Sun, table d'hôte.
Kultuur is a celebration of life – of its fleeting, sensual nature. A desire for simplicity exists in tension with the allure of excess.
The pleasures are earthly, even if their energy comes from the body of a star.

Maria Metsalu is an artist who uses her own body to explore contemporary issues, often employing sexually loaded means of expression. She views performance as a radical space and performing deviance as a possibility through which new ways of looking and seeing could be created. Her work seeks to proliferate meanings rather than systematize them into a clarity. She is interested in an emancipated audience and in ways the position of the spectator can be challenged, destabilised or abolished altogether. Besides her solo work she is one of the founding members of Young boy dancing group.

Her solo works have been shown in Art In General gallery (as part of Performa17), deSingel Theater, ICA Theater, Nanterre-Amandier Theater, Les Urbaines festival and Impulstanz festival amongst others.

Concept and performance: Maria Metsalu
Sound: Artjom Astrov
Text and dramaturgical assistance: Jaakko Pallasvuo
Scenography: Nikola Knezevic, Maria Metsalu
Food: Karim Boumjimar
Outfits: Kris Lemsalu with CRUDA and Varvara Boutique
Technical assistance: Henry Kasch, Bruno Lillemets
Project and touring manager: Kaie Küünal
Co-production: Maria Metsalu, Kanuti Gildi SAAL, TOASTER Copenhagen, Kiasma Theater, SPIELART Theaterfestival
Supported by: Cultural Ministry of Estonia, Estonian Cultural Endowment
Residency support: Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP), Kanuti Gildi SAAL.
Premiere: 31.10.2023, SPIELART Theaterfestival

In English
Duration: 90’