ARTIST STATEMENT

LUNARIS

A performative-cinematic multiverse

Since 2024 and in the coming years, Andrea Božić and Julia Willms are developing a performative-cinematic multiverse under the title LUNARIS, a fictional shared world embedded in the real world which hosts a constellation of artistic works as a transmedia labyrinth: several performances and audio-visual performative installations and related smaller works.

For LUNARIS, we collaborate with the Premonitions Agency, a specu-fictional government agency whose task is to collect, analyse and interpret citizens’ dreams, and to intervene into those dreams in an attempt to affect real-world events.

In LUNARIS we work with real night-time dreams, treating them as documentary material, donated by the artistic team and various other dreamers.

With LUNARIS, we explore how spectatorship, imagination and spectacle are intertwined, embodied and felt amidst the next wave of digitalization and globalization, and the questions of free will, agency and sentience within it.

We work with overlapping dream logic and gameplay strategies, cosmology, quantum physics and mysticism, exploring how – when these other logics are transposed and projected onto the everyday - this can allow for other perceptions and imaginaries to emerge.

The fictional world of LUNARIS is embedded into the real world: physically, virtually and imaginary. Our work is site-responsive in the sense that we incorporate the apparatus of the location (theatre, art space, location, etc.) into the LUNARIS-multiverse. In doing so, we seek to establish a playful relationship with our audience and partners, blur the boundaries of what all belongs to the work and invite an investigative, active, and playful engagement and communal imagining.

Each work is an independent project and together they belong to the same LUNARIS multiverse. The audience can see one project independently or follow several as a constellation. Dreams, characters and plot lines might be seen across multiple performances / installations.

LUNARIS hosts a constellation of works by Andrea Božić and Julia Willms, as well as related works by associate artist Billy Mullaney.

LUNARIS works include the performance Within Cells Interlinked, a performative dream collecting session Dream Archive: Live Collection, The Premonitions Agency - Dream Log

 

Spectra – Space Is an Organism

Since 2015, under the umbrella name Spectra - Space Is an Organism, Andrea Božić and Julia Willms have explored the relationship between attention and an embodied experience of space: how the (re)organisation of attention and space affects one’s sense of ‘reality’ and the modes of spectatorship emerging from it. How – when the logics of attention and space are altered – might a new ‘imaginal’ space appear in their overlap?

We create installations and performance environments that (re)organise the logic of how the space functions, provoking an investigative gaze through an embodied experience of artificially constructed but real spaces. Our works overlap the spatiotemporal logic of dreams, the interactivity of game-play and the deep-time scales of cosmology and quantum physics with the space here and now. Incorporating the apparatus and the architecture of the site with visitors’ own presence as part of the work, we create a porous border between the work, the stage and the world. Our artworks operate as interfaces with the world – to consider the co-constructedness of art and world as imaginal spaces, where re-configured attention can be practiced and taken into the world.

We work in site-responsive audio-visual installations, performances, digital collages, drawings, game-play scores and collaborations with the weather and night sky.

 

Spectra | Studio Opening: The Cube, the Salon and the Aquarium
Friday, 8 September 2017 at 19.00 hrs
Marci Panis, Marcusstraat 52 | 1D, Amsterdam

Let us gather in a Cube – a hollow symmetrical three-dimensional shape with six equal sides.
Let us gather in a Salon – A (with)drawing room in a house where guests assemble and may be entertained.
Let us gather in an Aquarium - a glass-sided tank in which living organisms are kept for exhibit or study.

Let us gather in an Aquaculon.

The Cube, The Salon and the Aquarium is the first Spectra | Salon in the series of evenings we are hosting this autumn. We open up our studio to explore the porous and fluid spaces we inhabit, produce, embody, imagine, adapt to, demolish, deconstruct and share.

Artists: Carsten Becker, Andrea Božić and Julia Willms

Spectra – space as an organism is a long term artistic practice and research into the attention and space and how their organisation affects our sense of embodiment, emergent realities and infrastructures by choreographer Andrea Božić and visual artist Julia Willms with Spectra | Studio as its base.

A building is a slowly unfolding event.

Ingredients of the evening:

The Cube – an immersive audio-visual installation for a room
Undoing What We Know |I  – attention and space exercise
Paper Architecture – paintings
And more

Opening 19.00-23.00
Live Undoing What We Know at 20.00

Produced by TILT. Spectra | Salons are made possible by the financial contribution of the Gemeente Amsterdam / Stadsdeel Oost. Supported by Marci Panis.

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The summer academy WE LIVE HERE is a platform for artistic encounters initiated by Nicole Beutler, Marijke Hoogenboom and Andrea Božić. As in previous editions we invite professionals active in different fields of the performing and visual arts to join this temporary community. With WE LIVE HERE we want to keep creating space to come together, to encounter, to work and think together beyond the scope of individual projects or production agendas.

The summer academy takes on a slightly different shape each year. For this edition we invited Mala Kline again to set up a study room where we will together explore emergent language or ways to articulate knowledge that emerges from embodied practices.