Gabrielle Martin chats with Mirko Guio, whose work, All That Remains, will be presented at the 20th PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. You can catch All That Remains on January 23 and 24 at SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.
Show Notes
Gabrielle and Mirko discuss:
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Where are you from and why is that important?
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What does it mean for your show, All That Remains, to be an “urgent call to consciousness”?
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How does being onstage affect people’s internal responses?
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How do you work in the devising process?
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What does it mean to be in a state of “sensitive listening”?
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What did your collaboration with a sculptor, Soren, entail?
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What are the parameters you offer your students based on Soren’s work?
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What is your practice of local collaboration?
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How does “All That Remains” fit into your larger practice?
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How do you devise “systems of responsiveness”?
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What is the place of your own body in your current artistic practice?
About Mirko Guido
Mirko Guido (b. Italy) works with dance and choreography between theatres, art galleries/museums, and public spaces - spanning over performances, installations, intra-disciplinary research projects, and publications. All works are a continual negotiation of boundaries — between body, space and materialities, between individual and collective experience, between certainty and ambiguity. Each project operates as a physical, material and intellectual inquiry into choreography as a system of responsiveness, guiding the attention towards the co-existence of multiple processes and materialities. As a dancer he worked in several dance companies, including the Cullberg Ballet, and with a great variety of choreographers, whom have provided him with a wide range of embodied perspectives on dance, from Mats Ek, Crystal Pite, Johan Inger to Deborah Hay, Benoît Lachambre, Cristina Caprioli and Tilman O’Donnel, passing by Paul Lighgoot & Sol Leon, Itzik Galili, Alexander Ekman, Rafael Bonachela, Jo Strømgren, Stephan Thoss among many others. As a choreographer Mirko he has toured his productions across Europe, including Athens dance festival (Greece), Festival La Becquée (France), Festival MAP/P E-motional (Portugal), Teatri di vita (Italy), Dance Station (Serbia), Weld and Dansens Hus (Sweden), Bora Bora and ARoS Art Museum (Denmark), SPEL - The State Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nicosia (Cyprus) among many others. His artistic processes have been supported by major choreographic centres such as Summer Studios Rosas, Work Space Brussels; Uferstudios Berlin; PACT Zollverein; MDT Stockholm to mention but a few. Mirko holds a master’s degree in New Performative Practices from DOCH / Stockholm University of the Arts, and today he’s based in Aarhus, Denmark, and is an in-house artist at Bora Bora – Dance and Visual Theater.
Land Acknowledgement
This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver. Mirko joins the conversation from Denmark.
It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.
Show Transcript
00:02
Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's director of programming, and today's episode highlights spaces of liminality and devising systems of responsiveness.
00:18
I'm speaking with Mirko Guido, artist behind All That Remains, which is being presented at the Push Festival, January 23rd and 24th, 2025. This choreographic work unfolds across a stage scattered with industrial debris and organic matter, where performers engage with their sculptural surroundings in a corporeal topography that collapses the boundary between inner landscapes and external realities.
00:43
A richly textured work at the crossroads of dance, installation, and sound performance, this piece asks us how we, as a species fallen out of sync with our environment, can open up new potentialities of relation and becoming.
01:00
Mirko Guido is an in-house artist at Bora Bora Dance and Visual Theatre. He holds a master's degree in new performative practices from DOC, Stockholm University of the Arts, and is a former dancer with the Kalberg Ballet.
01:14
Mirko Guido's distinctive choreographic lens, shaped by a diverse history of working in theatres, galleries, and public spaces, brings to the fore a dynamic engagement with today's anthropocentric existential dilemmas.
01:27
Here's my conversation with Mirko. Just before we hit record, we were acknowledging that it's so easy to get caught up in discussions around all the logistical pieces, so it's nice to actually, in the lead-up to the festival, sit down and really get to talk about the work itself and your practice, which is a real treat for me, and I know it's a treat for our listeners as well.
01:50
I really appreciate it, because I think, as you were saying, we get so sometimes overwhelmed by the practicalities, and that you... and their organization of making this happen. So to give space and time for us to connect on another level and talk about the practices and the work and also give the possibility to people to have another entry to the work.
02:19
I think it's a great initiative. So thank you. Thank you. And we're going to get right into it shortly. I do want to acknowledge that I am in this conversation today on the stolen traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples.
02:34
So these are the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh. I am a settler on these lands, and part of my responsibility as a settler is ongoing thinking about the implications of that. And those who've been listening to this podcast series will have heard me reference the Yellowhead Institute, which is an incredible resource for thinking indigenous perspective on policy and perspectives on policy that are affecting indigenous peoples today.
03:05
And they have a wonderful online course around Land Back and their red paper on the Land Back movement. And I think it's really important that just to talk about the roots of the Land Back movement, and this is something I'm educating myself on right now, and just really being clear that despite reconciliation rhetoric of contemporary politicians that Canada is still a colonial country.
03:34
And that over the years through policy, law, and interpretation, indigenous people and their authority have been attacked by land tenure and economic systems meant to benefit non-indigenous Canadians.
03:49
And each time indigenous people challenge the state of affairs, for example, with land defense actions, they are met with violence and criminalization in the name of public interest. And so I think that I'm just really appreciating the clarity with which this is articulated in the Yellowhead Institute's red paper.
04:13
Mirko, where are you joining the conversation from today? I am calling from, or I'm in this call from Denmark, which is in Europe, in the Scandinavian region. And I live here, I've been living here for the past three and a half years, more or less.
04:34
And Denmark is a land that has been mostly inhabited by various Germanic peoples since the ancient times. But I... I am Italian, before living in Denmark, I was living in Sweden for many years and also in Germany and Switzerland.
04:59
And yeah, but specifically I come from Lechke and I actually think, which is a small town in the South of Italy. I don't know if you see the boot Italy that looks like a boot then at the end of the hill in the South part facing, facing the East towards Greece, basically.
05:24
There is this small town called Lechke, which is in ancient times was called Terra d'Otranto or Salento, Salento or Terra d'Otranto. And so from that perspective, I'm actually, I'm routed to Mesape, which is the...
05:44
the first people, let's say, from the Terra d'Otranto and Salento. But I also have to acknowledge that we're also inextricably rooted to Greeks and Byzantines and many other populations that have passed by the Salento over the centuries.
06:11
And this is quite striking because it's something that you can notice in the language, in the culture, in the crafts, and even in the people's feature. So from that perspective, it's a very rich and diverse land.
06:30
And I wanted to acknowledge, because I was thinking about this, that among the various populations that have passed by, there are also the Normans, which the Normans were intermingling between Norse Viking settlers and locals from West France.
06:50
And so perhaps there is an older connection that runs through me with Scandinavia. And also, as you can see, people cannot see it, but you can see that I have red hair, which is not exactly a typical hair color in the Mediterranean area.
07:14
So yeah. So this is some funny anecdotes also that I'm sharing with you now. Yeah, thank you. I think it's always fascinating to think about the layered history of peoples. I mean, unfortunately, often in the context of conquest, sometimes just in trade.
07:37
But this is like the layers of cultural exchange and then sometimes cultural exchange. domination but like just how layered that history is in any one place if we go far enough back in time and in some places in the world more than others in terms of the different types of peoples who've come and settled over generations.
08:01
Thanks so much for sharing that. We're going to talk about all that remains. So you've described all that remains as not just a performance but an urgent call to consciousness. Can you elaborate on that?
08:14
Yeah, thank you. Well, we live in times in which the conditions around ourselves, environmental conditions, social and political conditions are changing very drastically and also at a very fast speed.
08:44
So I think we just need to pay attention. That's my idea, that's my thought. We need to pay attention to the changes that are happening and not only an attention towards that, but also an acknowledgement and awareness that we live in a mutual affect with our surrounding.
09:14
And these ideas of attention and presence and the knowledge in this mutual affect is exactly the principles upon which all the tremendous is built in the way that the performers work with their bodies in relation to the sculptures, in relation to sound, in relation to the lights and how they attend the moment and the present moment and how they are in the space of listening and fluctuating between how their internal landscapes and external realities,
10:01
they co-form one another. And in a way, I would say that that's also what the performance, what all that remains wants to do towards the public, towards the audience. It is asking also for the public to be present and to pay attention and to, not only to what's happening on stage, but also how that affects their internal, emotional and physical responses.
10:38
Yeah, you've spoken about your work being in dynamic engagement with today's Anthropocentre. existential dilemmas and I really feel that that's the call of this work for me how it speaks to this kind of anxiousness or tension you know you spoke about the wider context of the global upheavals that we're experiencing but this is through the body the fact that it's it speaks to this without words and so while there are bodies humans on stage as the main actors the fact that they're expressing in a way that feels very unmediated and for me interpreting the work so not heavily informed by a specific dance technique you know for my eye anyways that they're in relation to their environment in a way that kind of brings them into a more like animalistic context or like de-centering or the ways that humans have existed in nature that have created the Anthropocene as we know it feels like it is deconstructed in some way on stage.
11:49
So I'm really curious how you talk about the internal realities of the artist on stage, the bodies in conversation with the external environment. Can you talk a little bit about the devising process?
12:05
How do you get to that place with the artist? What was the creative process like when exploring that? There was a moment in the process when we started to work with all those objects and we had even more objects that we spent with the performers.
12:23
We spent a lot of time. So we were working on a very long open scores, we will call them, in which we would have some basic principles that were crucial for our research. But we would not know how we would structure the time and the events, we were calling them events inside of that score.
12:52
So basically what I'm talking about is that we would do like a two, two and a half hours open score in which we would work with some themes and some principles of relation with the objects, relation with the space, relation with one another.
13:08
And that formed very much for us a particular experience of time and a particular sensitivity to expectations of resisting the desire for certainty and for immediately producing a form and resolving something and rather stayed more into a state of...
13:44
of sensitive listening that is not only perceptual or somatic, it's also material, it's special, it has many, many layers. And that process formed very much a particular tone and attitude in the work.
14:06
So it wasn't pre-decided how we were going to, let's say, how we were going to look and how we were going to move, right? It emerged throughout this experience of staying in the space with those objects for a long time and then, of course, being driven by some themes and some choreographic ideas that we had, such as that of creating sanctuaries or diving in pooling into our internal landscapes, almost creating a small ritual of reconnecting with our ancestral forces,
14:49
and then bringing those forces back in the space, right? But we were doing this for like a space of two, two and a half hours without exactly knowing where something was gonna happen. And that was the devising process.
15:07
And then later on, then we started to have to make decisions because we had to bring it on stage within a certain amount of time and so forth. But that experience, I think it's very crucial for how the work came into being.
15:27
And I would like to add something important about this space of waiting and staying with the moment and staying with the listening. Because at that time, I had come across a fantastic lecture by Joakim Olafeh.
15:51
And he's a philosopher, a writer and activist. Yes, big inspiration. And actually, I'll just pipe in that last year, it was on one of our artists, Cherish Menza, who introduced and actually mentioned him on this podcast and introduced us to his work.
16:08
Yeah, amazing. It was a fantastic lecture, very inspiring. And like it really like it's not just inspiring, it really moved something for us in the work. Like it became a crux that turned and redirected many of our intentions.
16:25
And the lecture, I want to read the title because the title, I think it's beautiful in itself and is the spirituality of cracks and the gift of failure at world endings. And And in this lecture he proposes a notion of the wound not as something that is to be immediately repaired so that we can go back to what it was, right?
16:52
So that we can ignore that something drastic has happened, something violent in some way for the body, for the flesh has happened, right? And then we just close it and go back and we repair it. But in that moment he proposes the idea of the wound rather as a phenomenon that is trying to make us notice that something is not functioning.
17:19
And so perhaps we need to linger in there. We need to wait a little bit longer and try to sense what other directions we can take, what other possibilities are there, what is the space of the wound, right?
17:33
And... And so for me, in that moment, the space of the wound was physically the space in which we were, in which we were like, was the space in which we were working in with our bodies and with the objects.
17:51
Thank you. And you talk about objects. So you combine an advanced physical practice with meticulously curated visual, spatial, material, and intellectual context. In all that remains, you collaborated with sculptor Sorin Engsted.
18:08
Am I pronouncing that correctly? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, Sorin. And you also collaborated with Sorin on your piece once again, Sisyphus. Can you talk about that collaboration? How did you come to work together and what direction the research took specifically for all that remains, the evolution of the design of the sculptures?
18:28
Yeah, so actually, when Sorin and I worked together for once again, Sisyphus, we were already planning to work on all that remains. But at that moment, I was working at Aros Art Museum, which is a museum here in Aros.
18:48
And I was working on a durational performance called The Longest Gap. And at that time, I invited, so we were already talking with Sorin about all that remains, and I invited him to just hang around in the atelier there at the museum.
19:08
And so the once again, Sisyphus came about rather spontaneously. He made this giant inflatable ball covered with aluminum foliar. And I was carrying this, you know, I have to say that the Aros Art Museum is made like a many different floors that go, I don't know maybe it's like five or six floors and there is this like beautiful staircase, a spiral staircase that runs through the middle of the museum that it really gives this like sense of like a spine of the of the building and but also is made with a very typical Scandinavian Danish architecture where the space is very open you can see all this like the directions of the space are very visible a lot of crossing directions of each of different floors but it's also quite open so you can also see through different floors from balconies and so forth and then I was I was basically going from the bottom floor all the way up with this with this giant giant pole and I think that I was I was disrupting in some ways the flow of people moving.
20:41
And, you know, like when there is a lot of people at the museum, they're going, they go through the museum from one place to another in a very consumption driven way of seeing artworks, right? From one gallery to another.
20:56
And then all of a sudden there's this guy with this giant ball that has to pass. And so it's like kind of disrupting their flow and it's redirecting their attention. And it's also regathering attention in a different and unexpected way while I was in some ways like in Sisyphus being punished to repeat this action over and over and then bring up this aluminum board.
21:27
But Sorin and I, we knew each other already. We met earlier. By chance, because our daughters were going to the same school, in the same class. And then I first met his wife, Diana Baldon, which was the director at the time of the Ors constelles.
21:50
And then I met him and I came across his work. And at that moment, I was already working and researching for all that remains, but I was more in a phase in which I was more busy just with the idea, with the concept of the space of liminality.
22:13
I was very intrigued by this like being between the before and after. But then meeting his work, I was particularly struck by one of his installation work, which is, it's called if the future. isn't bright, at least it's colorful.
22:42
But what it did for me, meeting his work and talking with him about it, is that in that moment of the process, it really like situated in a different way, in a more concrete way, what that space in between was for me.
23:02
And in a very concrete terms, it was a space among remnants, rests between a world that was before and a world that is yet to come. And so, and that actually, before earlier we were talking about the lecture of Bayou Como Lafe, which happened in...
23:31
in almost in the same period. So those two elements, those two encounters, have really directed the work in a specific direction. Yeah, and Sorin, maybe I have to specify, because Sorin's sculptures, he's working with material coming from industrial waste, and he makes like hybrid assemblages that are like this kind of like a, I mean, it's not only industrial waste, it's also working with different kind of like a found objects.
24:08
And that then he transforms through craft interventions. And we have a really exciting collaboration taking place for these Vancouver performances of all that remains. So fourth year students of Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts production and design program will create artistic responses to Sorin's work re-imagining and producing the sculptures for these local performances.
24:37
So this experiment reflects your ecological and socio-cultural approach to sustainability, because it was, you know, you who kind of brought this idea forward as a possibility. Can you talk about, well, I would actually like to hear a couple things.
24:53
First, let's talk a little bit more about the parameters that you are offering these students. So based on Sorin's work, you know, you talked about hybridity, what are kind of the things that the, yeah, the fundamental parameters that you're offering these students.
25:10
And then afterwards, I want to talk a little bit more about your practice of local collaboration. One of the things that is very important is that the materials that they are going to work with. And yeah, I also have to mention that it's a very exciting a collaboration for me because it speaks to this notion and practice of responsiveness on another level.
25:44
And of course, it also brings some kind of like a level of uncertainty, but I think it's also a lot of potentiality. And that's what it is exactly to stay in that or to create even the conditions to experience that and to work with that.
26:06
And this is a very concrete situation. And I'm really enthusiastic about this. And so go back to the parameters. So there is something about, of course, the type of materials that they use. And this is also, again, exciting, because instead of coming with our objects from Denmark to Vancouver to perform, instead, what are the found objects there, the locally found objects, and what is the the perspective of industrial waste material combined with other synthetic and natural materials,
26:57
right? Like there is some elements that Soren worked with that are like, for instance, coming from the sea, like there is a piece of driftwood, which is fantastic, or there is like
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