The interplay between surface and movement in this performative "deep dive" recalls Èdouard Glissant’s concept of opacity: the refusal to be fully seen or fully known.

 

The body inscribes, but the form resists simple translation.

Its meaning hovers, partial and layered. It is an encounter with the unknowable, where what remains is as vital as what is lost.

 

The experiment challenges the stability of language, as Umberto Eco reminds us, where metaphor collapses distinctions and leaves meaning unstable. Here, each expression, born from dance and surface, becomes a fragment. It invites a question rather than a statement.

 

This project, then, invites us today to ask: What is known about the death of a surface? If the drinking can, which has already lived and been discarded, is reborn through contact, through print, through dance, has it died, or has it entered another form of life.

Does it acquire a state where it can hold memory as trace rather than clarity?

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The traces left on the cans answer without resolving: the surface never dies.

It shifts, folds, and carries every gesture, every residue, every attempt to know without conquering.

 

What then if language is not what we say, but what lingers beyond the edges of what can be said?

In this way, this work reminds us that surfaces, like words, live beyond their use, and in their afterlife, they may.

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Invited by LACE Symposium at ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna, 2025.

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photo credit: Anna Betsch