Give Rise To Marta Navaridas, Alex Deutinger & Manuel Riegler
MOTORA This Day is not Promised 

Performance: 16.6. & 17.6., 8 pm
meeting point: HALLE FÜR KUNST

The HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark in cooperation with brut wien is pleased to offer Graz-based artists Marta Navaridas, Alex Deutinger and Manuel Riegler a stage in the Stadtpark adjacent to the institution for a performance with radiance. In MOTORA – This Day Is Not Promised, Marta Navaridas interacts with a Volvo V60 and seeks a real encounter between two bodies – one organic and one non-organic. Overshadowed by the awareness of her own fragility, she explores her affects towards the machine and performs a poetic ritual of fatalism that meanders between erotic seduction, wishful thinking, pragmatic realism and tender anthropomorphization.

In a sense not only our cars, but all the machines that we build are mirrors of our own desires and of the ways in which we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world. While we seem to be making progress, the cars we make are becoming safer, more artificially intelligent, more autonomous, and increasingly networked, and above all they are becoming exponentially more numerous, just as is humankind itself. In a way, automobiles are the ultimate stereotype for the promise of capitalism. This is a promise of a dream come true, with a potential nightmare following on its heels. 

The piece, which lasts about an hour and is accompanied by light and sound elements, takes a look at the relationship between subject and object – man and car. The composition of the sound comes from contemporary sound synthesis specialist Manuel Riegler, while Marta Navaridas and Alex Deutinger are responsible for the choreography. The protagonist is Navaridas herself, who plays the human counterpart to the Volvo, which is also a moving stage set.

Inspired by J. G. Ballard’s Crash, MOTORA draws on stereotypical desires, death wishes, and tropes such as drive-in cinema, car sex, car parties, carwash, and car-share karaōke, mixing these with intimate reflection by the artist, who crash-tests her relationship with her car.

Curated by Jan Tappe