Silent Trio is an ongoing project by Christina Ciupke and Darko Dragičević that unfolds in distinct, separate chapters in which they explore the interrelation between nature and man-made. It started in January 2020 and it will continue its development until October 2021.
The two artists inscribe the body and notions of perception into these interrelations. In addition to research on continuous movement, they investigate and collect different manifestations of objects—both natural and man-made, static and changing. In doing so they enter into a field of tension that is increasingly out of balance, particularly given the broader context of political and environmental precariousness. The disruptions and different states of growth, decay, shifts, and cracks that result become the focus of their ongoing work.
On their recent trip to the former Yugoslavia, for instance they visited the Spomenik monuments that were built between 1960 and 1985 during the Tito era. These monuments were built to last and meant to outlive human generations, political turbulence, and social upheavals, but now find themselves in a state of physical and cultural decay. The two artists approached the resonations these monuments triggered in their bodies by exploring different qualities of movement, activated by their internal and external states of consciousness.
For this chapter, they produced four digital postcards intended to serve as a snapshot of their current state of research.
2020–ongoing, Four videos
These digital postcards were presented in an online lecture as part of Ecology of Attention #3: Listening Out Loud.
Christina Ciupke lives and works as a choreographer and performer in Berlin. She develops her projects in close collaborations with other artists. Within that arise specific spaces and situations, where the encounters between audience and performer are constantly re-negotiated. She has collaborated with choreographers such as Ayse Orhon, Jasna Vinovrski, Mart Kangro, Nik Haffner, the composer Boris Hauf, the dramaturge Igor Dobričić, and visual and performance artist Darko Dragičević. She received a MA in Choreography at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK) in 2013. From 2016 to 2020 Christina was represented as an artist by Tanzfabrik Berlin within the apap-Network.
Darko Dragičević is a Belgrade-born, Berlin-based visual and performance artist and filmmaker. He works on interdisciplinary projects and cross-media collaborations as the expanded practices within the fields of visual arts, performance, choreography, and film. This year Dragičević is collaborating with Christina Ciupke, Jasna Layes Vinovrški, Siri Jøntvedt, Jasmina Založnik, Martin Sonderkamp, and Zeina Hanna on a range of different projects. He is an artistic director and editor of the project Lie & Theft as Practice, which has been developed in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in Belgrade.