Sarah Manya

Sarah Manya | Nomad sessions


The narrative of leaving home produces too many homes and hence no Home…There was always something comforting, familiar about airports and air terminals. They give a sense of purpose and security. I was there with a definite destination-usually home, somewhere…Home becomes the impossibility and necessity of the subject’s future (one never gets there, but is always getting there), rather than the past that binds the subject to a given place.” Sara Ahmed

How many of us as members of the artistic community actually identify as part of a nomadic group? Many of us have left our “homes” and have found second, third and fourth homes, languages and identities. We are used to working and thinking nomadically-and this in itself constitutes a commonality. But how many of us actually identify as a part of the international, artistic diaspora? What would happen if we recognized this as shared experience despite our wide geography and patterns of mobility?

The installation/performance Nomad Sessions seeks to provoke questions about collective and individual identity through the process of interviews and through a video installation created from the interviews. The interviews are performative and experiential, exploring the notion of community and common experience among the artistic diaspora and precariat. The one-on-one interviews last for approximately twenty minutes. Participants will sign up for time slots via internet and will be filmed, although they will have the option to opt out of the filming should they choose so and just participate in the interview for the experience.

Participants will sign up by being in contact with the O Vertigo Office or via a web-link that will be sent.


Sarah Manya is a performance maker and choreographer. She makes site-specific works and dance theatre performances as well as multi-media productions. Her work has been performed throughout Europe in festivals such as Springdance, Festival Something Raw, Motel Mozaique, Festival Tweetakt, and Noorderzon, Body Stroke, Recyclart (BE) Festival Neuer Tanz (DE). She has been a guest artist and lecturer at New York University and Amsterdam School of the Arts Modern Theater Dance Department among others. As a performer, she has worked with Felix Ruckert, Martin Butler, Vera Mantero and Vloeistof. Her training includes DasArts (NL), Rotterdamse Dansacademie (NL) and The Laban Centre for Movement and Dance (UK.) She is the recipient of a Fulbright/Netherland-America Foundation Fellowship in Choreography.

Robin Pineda Gould is a self-taught musician/composer & filmmaker. Abandoned buildings, dried lakes and lonely forests first haunted the landscapes of his mind. That and the cinema. The body creeped into his understanding of time and now he finds himself at home in Montréal wresting fragments of duration out of stubborn images and droning soundscapes, a perpetual exercise of negotiation and endurance -be it through collaborations with other artists or in his own practice.

Credits


Concept, performance and direction : Sarah Manya
Video work: Robin Pineda Gould

Photo: Nickie Theunissen