The performance APPROACHING ULTRA LIGHT is based on the artist’s research and interviews with mobile population groups in Switzerland, southern Germany and Alsace. The interest in the topic is based on early wanted pictures, wanted lists and biopolitical efforts to homogenize and whitewash the population in these areas. In her performance, Romy Rüegger uses text, language and sound to deal with the archiving and handling this knowledge and incorporates various associations.
What is the right to opacity we discuss memory as a filter and, with it, the choices we make in narrating and performing who we are and how we came to be.
The performance is a set of loose associations via projections, sets of movements and alternating sentences that wander about the question of the traveller and her status in a time of an overt manifestation of the nation-state and all the (imperial) border politics connected to it.
Romy Rüegger is a visual artist based in Berlin and Zurich. She develops performances, audio works and writings that consider how we move and communicate in social space, the institutions and structures that control and restrict these actions.
Her work is often site-specific and made in collaboration with other artists, creating sites of shared listening, encounter and unlearning that counter accepted narratives and value systems.
In her performances, Romy addresses social change questions beyond the nation-state’s borders and national language. She also works on publishing texts by artists engaged in anti-racist and de-colonial practices of unlearning in the cultural field.
The presence of the artist at the ARé festival was ensured by the Swiss Pro-Helvetia Foundation.
