Zheng Bo, Le Sacre du printemps, 2021–2022. Image courtesy the Artist
Join us as we explore the interaction between the body and the environment in a conversation with Alice Audouin, Zheng Bo and Marie-Luce Nadal. Zheng Bo will talk about his dance film titled Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) (2021), in which Zheng collaborated with five Nordic male dancers in a forest in Dalarna, Sweden. The troupe cultivated relationships beyond the fern, feeding the collective sexual desires of the pine trees, moss, and one another through touch and movement. This is developed from his ongoing video and performance series Pteridophilia, which began in 2016, the artist explores the erotic possibilities between plants — specifically ferns — and queer men. Sex occurs in many ways in the works, provocatively moving past the merely sensuous and into climactic acts of pleasure.
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Marie-Luce Nadal will discuss her Faire Pleurer les Nuages (Make the Clouds Cry), an outdoor performance created by the artist in direct continuity with her grandfather's farmer practice; cloud seeding. At dawn or dusk, after a fencing duel, the artist uses a crossbow made of steel and bra wire with breath's ammunition, sulfur and dynamite to shoot in the clouds and make the sky cry.
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About the speakers
Alice Audouin has been committed to sustainable development for more than 20 years and has spent 18 years building the relationship between contemporary art and the environment. She is the president and founder of Art of Change 21 (whose patron is Olafur Eliasson), which is a non-profit organisation that works around the world organising art prizes, exhibitions and conferences, etc. In addition, Art of Change 21 has invited artists to every COP climate change conference since 2015. John Gerrard and Lucy Orta were invited to COP26. As an art curator, she has organised a large number of climate and biodiversity-themed exhibitions such as Biocenosis21 (2021), Warmingland (2018), Post-carbon (2015) and now Novacène (14 May – 2 October 2022) at the Gare Saint Sauveur in Lille, France. She is also an art advisor, consultant, lecturer and the chief Editor of Impact Art News, a bilingual newsletter on the arts and the environment.
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Marie-Luce Nadal (MLN) is particularly interested in the scientific and mystical relationships that we nurture with our atmosphere. Meteorological and artistic experiences are part of Marie-Luce’s universe. An organic and spiritual relationship binds her to the sky. Through modern forms of writing, embodied in movement and image, systems of projections and metonymies, through variations of scales and animated reproductions of atmospheric phenomena, MLN seeks to rediscover this vitality, to put it forward and to nourish it in the audience’s mind. MLN creates performative machine-works, which combine plastic singularity, scientific research and technical viability, which can be used and deployed by the audience.
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Zheng Bo lives on Lantau Island. Committed to more-than-human vibrancy, he grows weedy gardens, living slogans, eco-queer films, and wanwu workshops to cultivate ecological wisdom beyond Anthropocene extinction. In 2021 he staged three solo exhibitions: Wanwu Council, Gropius Bau, Berlin; You are the 0.01%, Schering Stiftung, Berlin; Life is hard. Why do we make it so easy?, Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden, Hong Kong. In 2022 he presents a new dance film titled Le Sacre du printemps (Tandvärkstallen) at the Venice Biennale. He participated in Liverpool Biennial (2021), Yokohama Triennale (2020), Manifesta (2018), Taipei Biennial (2018), and Shanghai Biennial (2016).