AMOW - Artistic intensions
- At what point does comfort become denial?
We live in a world that is cracking, yet our instinct is often numbness-watching collapse unfold from the inside as if it were inevitable, as if it were not our responsibility. AMOW seeks to disrupt that passivity. It asks how we shift from anaesthetized spectatorship to active presence: how to stay awake, alert, and engaged when the structures we rely on begin to fail. It calls for stepping above the destruction our comforts create, not to contemplate it, but to respond.
In this work, circus becomes a way of interfering with reality. Rigging acts as contemporary puppetry, animating objects until they gain presence, agency, and a life of their own. The human body and the crafted object become peers-coexisting in a post-human landscape where liveliness is not limited to organisms but extends to everything shaped by labor. The suspended house behaves unpredictably: sometimes an accomplice, sometimes an adversary, sometimes openly hostile.
Originally conceived in-situ, AMOW is anchored in spaces that resist domestication-industrial zones, ruins, forests, and environments marked by abandonment or over-writing. These are places where comfort has not erased memory. In such contexts, the fragile suspended house resonates as an intrusion or as the natural continuation of a landscape shaped by collapse. The work confronts these spaces not to beautify them, but to reveal the forces that move beneath their surfaces and the agency of materials we usually consider inert.
Synopsis
A man inhabits a suspended house. At first, he drifts through a numbed routine-seated at a table, absorbed by his phone, surrounded by objects that suffocate more than they support. Then the house begins to misbehave. A chair tries to break, a bed rejects sleep, an armchair trembles awake.
The domestic space doesn’t only turn against him; it communicates with him. He argues with his toilet, negotiates with the house’s strange intelligence, seeking impossible solutions to the instability that surrounds him.
As the architecture destabilizes, aerial straps, hair suspension, and a rigging vocabulary inspired by puppetry force the performer to navigate between structure and emptiness. Objects behave like organs of a home exposed, and the body bends through states that are comical, fragile, or hallucinatory. AMOW is a half-solo in which the performer shares the stage with a living, reactive house.
The piece moves toward a dissolution of distance: in the end, the protagonist sits with the audience, erasing the line between metaphor and reality. Through this collapse-of home, of identity, of theatrical illusion-the ruins become a space of renewed possibility.
