FRIISLAND LIVE: Radical Empathy

FRIISLAND LIVE, 2nd March 2024, 3-5 PM
Live performance and film screenings
"Healing" is the uniting concept in the practices of Va-Bene Fiatsi (GH) and Marcus Coates (UK). One has studied as a priest, the other as a shaman. Both rely on the ability of performance to create identification and radical empathy. By taking on pain, suffering and hardship for others, they share and transform these experiences.
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Va-Bene Fiatsi [ aka crazinisT artisT] currently lives in Kumasi, Ghana but works internationally as a multidisciplinary “artivist”, fighting for LGBTQ+ Rights in Ghana.
https://www.crazinistartist.com/
Marcus Coates lives in London. Through his vicarious experiences on behalf of people, his work offers an inquiry into the degrees to which we can know and relate to others.
https://www.marcuscoates.co.uk/
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Va-Bene Fiatsi: KALL FOR HEALING
Healing is a process and a ritual of becoming through physical, spiritual, mental and emotional endurance, violence and alternative death. It intensifies its own pains by scratching our wounds. We die to live! Our endurance is only sustained through the joy, the hope and dreams of rebirth. Healing and its rituals are paradoxical, leaving us with new scars and fresh memories of our wounds that allow us to reimagine our own wholeness, survival, strength and to experience a new perfection.
In the performance, the artist invites the audience to join the ritual of healing as an intimate encounter, communal solidarity and to reflect on their own wounds, privileges, or vulnerabilities. It allows both the artist and the audience to reimagine their own journey to healings while contemplating on the wholeness and the wildness of that enduring process of becoming.
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Marcus Coates: THE DIRECTORS
The Directors is a collaboration between artist Marcus Coates and five individuals in recovery from different lived experiences of psychosis. Positioned behind the camera, each of them directs Coates in a filmed restaging of particular episodes from their lives.
Following extensive research and discussion, the five short films challenge cultural stigma through an attempt to understand different realities. Each director chose a location of personal significance where they filmed Coates embodying and performing their own experiences.
The 5 films by Marcus Coates can be experienced in Friisland until March 20th, 2024. Weekdays 12-16, but it is advised to write or call in advance.
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We thank Statens Kunstfond for the support.
www.friisland.dk
FRIISLAND is a center for performative practices, founded by Live Art Denmark in 2021 with support from Statens Kunstfond.