The Austrian-Estonian performance artist and musician Netti Nüganen, who has toured for many years as a performer with Florentina Holzinger, explores dark ecologies in her work—constructing them on stage through large material battles and then dismantling them piece by piece. She questions how we speak about and with them, and what we are able to imagine beyond them. In Ash, horizon, riding a house, Nüganen and her two collaborators experience how identity and belonging always remain fluid and are shaped by weather and environment.

How can we belong—or come to belong anywhere at all—in a fragile and unstable environment like our own? In response to a world in which land, language, and folklore have long since become commodities, Nüganen, Sova, and Kisling surround themselves with ice. The audience is invited to look after objects made of ice within a constantly dripping landscape of ice screens. In this uncompromising performance, Nüganen becomes a narrator who guides the audience through nightmarish episodes and embodies different perspectives on the local by transforming into figures such as a real estate agent, an auctioneer, and a tourist. Against the backdrop of melting scenery, any expectation of permanence is ultimately abandoned.

TEAM

Concept, choreography Netti Nüganen

Performance Netti Nüganen, Pire Sova, Michaela Kisling

Sound design Michaela Kisling

Scenography Pire Sova

Text Netti Nüganen

Lighting design Klimentina Milenova

Costume (house) Zody Burke

Ice models Madlen Hirtentreu

Production management partner in crime and Kaie Küünal