Marialena Marouda
wpZimmer resident in 2021
Marialena Marouda is a perfomance maker based in Brussels and Frankfurt am Main. She studied philosophy and visual arts at Columbia University in New York and continued her studies at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen. In May 2018 she completed the Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies (a.pass), a program for artistic research in Brussels.
Marialena focuses on relational knowledge practices and their performances. She works primarily with language and (its) sound. Her work is developed over the long term and is research-based. It takes place outside and beyond the black box, often developed in situ. She is the initiator and artistic coordinator of The Oceanographies Institute (2018-present), which has been collaborating with various festivals and workspaces in Belgium and Germany.
Previous works include Poetry Exercises: a choir of urban sounds (2017) shown at the International Festival for Performing Arts in Terni (IT), Poetry Exercises: an archive of (un)familiar things (2013-16) presented during the Festival Implantieren 2016 in the Institute for City History at Frankfurt am Main, and Walking Exercises (2010-13), shown at the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main and the Sophiensaele in Berlin. Marialena is collaborating with choreographer Fabrice Mazliah on the Manufactured Series (2019-present). She has also collaborated with the choreographers Deufert&Plischke for their works Entropic Institute (2012) and Anarchiv I (2008). As a writer and critic, she has written for the Performing Arts Journals MASKA and Etcetera a.o.
projects
Oceanographies
In Oceanographies, Marialena Marouda is interested in knowledges in the plural. She focuses particularly on those knowledges of ocean that are inherent in encountering it. The focus of her research is therefore the relation between two kinds of bodies: the human body and the vast body of water that the ocean is. It is the relation of the hands to the mud, the ears to the breaking of the waves, the feet to the feeling of sinking, that the work focuses on –rather than on the ocean “in itself”, devoid of the human presence.
The work seeks to weave the complexity that arises from those interactions into the tellings of stories of encountering the ocean -and their demonstrations. The aim is to develop a nomad oceanographic institute in which the (re-)telling of those experiences, the performing of the relationship(s) that are described, can summon or evoke the ocean. That is, performance becomes here a tool and an art-science by means of which the ocean and the researcher can be merged into a single body of water.
Oceanographies (try-out) has been presented in OpenHouse13 on 24 June 2018.
credits
Concept & direction: Marialena Marouda
Performance: Marialena Marouda, Justine Maxelon
Graphic design Oceanic Scorebook: Dear Reader
Residency and support: a.pass, Nadine & WAB 2018, wpZimmer, Workspacebrussels
Special thanks to Andre Cattrijsse, Caroline Godart, Thanos Gkritzalis, Loes Jacobs, Philippine Hoegen, Zoumana Méïté, Lilia Mestre, Carine Meulders, Eva Moulaert, Anna Pouskouri-Reiche, Eshter Rodriguez Barbero, Sina Seifee, Femke Snelting, Thomas Vandorpe en Gosie Vervloessem
Poetry Exercises: an archive of (un)familiar things
Many of our experiences of life in the city are so commonplace that they are not consciously perceived. Yet it is precisely these “minor” experiences that define our inhabiting the city. The archive of (un)familiar things collects such stories of inhabiting and passes them on to visitors. Three performers exercise themselves in a self-invented practice of storytelling, going beyond a merely functional way of speaking. In their Poetry Exercises, which take place in the space between the storytellers and the listeners, the nomadic archive enters into a dialogue with the official collection of the Frankfurt Institute for City History.
The goal of the Poetry Exercises is to search for, invent and enable a possibility for poetry within contemporary relations of production. Poetry here does not mean ‘poetic form’ in the conventional sense, but rather a self-invented practice of oral (story)telling of contemporary experiences. These storytelling exercises are tools for relating to the surrounding world and to each other. The goal of the poetry is to express the intensity of inhabiting the contemporary world.
credits
Concept & idea: Marialena Marouda
Performance & choreography: Katja Cheraneva, Marialena Marouda, Malte Scholz
Installation: Eleni Mouzourou
Dramaturgy & production: Maja Zimmerman
Technical director: Harry Schulz
Funded by the Cultural Office Frankfurt am Main and the Hessian Ministry for Science and Art
With the support of the Institute of City History Frankfurt am Main, wpZimmer Antwerp, BUDA Kunstencentrum Kortrijk and ID_Frankfurt.