There are no empty spaces: the wooden floor we perform on, in the studios of this school but also most performance venues in the Netherlands, is made of Keruing wood. The species of trees whose flesh lies on our floors is native to South-East Asia, and through deforestation is now an endangered species on the red list of IUCN*. Where this tree comes from, a whirlwind of life and death blows around their roots. Illegal logging has destroyed huge parts of Indonesia's rainforests, so the valuable flesh of the trees can be sold to the West. The floor of our stages is blood-stained. What does it mean to stand on this no-more-tree, but not-yet-soil, on this body killed by colonial violence?

We think of these trees as ghosts. Their presence, stuck in a temporal arrest between life and death, haunts this space: whispering the stories of the forest, creaking under your feet, remembering the trees that grew tall. In the wake of these botanic evidences of genocide, our movement becomes unsettled, innocence becomes impossible. The ghosts haunt us in the traces of wooden memories: scars, scratches, markings, cuts. We attempt to hold a seance for these ghosts to stay with their haunting, their relentless remembering, to invoke the sounds of a tree falling in a forest.

We invite you to an open studio where we will share our research on Saturday, 03.06. from 18:00 until circa 21:00. Lou Seidel and Toni Kritzer are collaborating in an intimate research process with the wood in studio 8.13, searching for both embodied and theoretical ways to stay with the tree’s ghostly presence. We will offer fragments of performative experiments, visual traces of the research, a publication preview, conversations, a snack, tea...

Reservation information:
Please sign up via this google sheet, so we can estimate how many we will be. If you have any questions, feel free to write to tonikritzer@gmail.com

Contributors: Lou Seidel and Toni Kritzer

Location:
Venue: 8.13, ATD Jodenbreestraat 3, Amsterdam