Sabine Zahn
Researcher
THIRD Fellow (Cohort 4), DAS Research
Born in Dresden, living in Berlin. Studied journalism and theatre studies, trained as a theatre maker for physical theatre at Academia Teatro Dimitri and was a guest student at MAC HZT Berlin. Different somatic practices accompany and sustain how she develops choreographic approaches and formats since 2005. In particular she investigates how choreographic strategies expand the way urbanity and urban space can be lived, expressed and transformed. Her practice includes establishing its own environment within a wider practical, discursive and artistic field of both urbanism, choreography and life. It embraces transdisciplinary collaboration, like the long lasting connection to architect collective raumlaborberlin.
Research/travel grants (for the city of Medellin/CO, Kaliningrad/RU) supported her research and practice elsewhere. Projects include “Fremdgehen - a choreographic expansion of city” 2019/20 and “Stadterweitern” 2020. She taught at Universities in the field of urbanism, cultural studies and dance (like at KABK The Hague, Witten Herdecke, HZT Berlin) and is part of AREAL_artistic researchlab Berlin since 2011.
Research
Doing/city is how I currently name my artistic research practice which unfolds between the realms of choreography, somatics and urbanism. At its core it is a solistic movement research practice, that investigates the modalities of city as physically enacted space. The practice inserts itself into the dynamics of urban situations and acts already in a transformational mode while researching this very potential. I aim to grasp this processing, its facets and modalities in the first place, driven by the question of what and how the spaces of action are - the Handlungsräume - that open up doing/city.
In its wider frame doing/city is the base to create joint research situations, recalibrate disciplinary relations and engage in discourse and action about the creation and emergence of urban processes. The research is unfolding a perspective towards city life as an immediate, physically and spatially conditioned, complex entanglement of actions, that carries its future as a potential of action in the present. Here it is deeply informed and corresponds with the so called urban practice, with practices of making city and spacial planning disciplines but also with other adjoining fields. It takes form through various set ups, seeking coherency or challenging the specific conditions and fields, in which and to which it speaks. A second important layer of the research is therefore questions of languaging, and naming, of communicating and mapping in the broadest yet most specific sense.
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