Zoë Binetti | Research Trip

April 2022 — Performing Arts

Based in Bern, Switzerland, Zoë Binetti’s performance art practice weaves together the visceral poetry of bodies, objects and space. She will spend a month in Ghana from 4 April to 4 May 2022 to continue her artistic research through movement.

In January 2021 Zoë  was invited to take part in the perforcraZe International Artist Residency at cazinisT artisT studiO in Kumasi, Ghana. During this time she created the series Streets_Dancing & Washing Obroni Wawu, a performance photo series that attempts to relate to colonial history starting from the materiality of her own body, and addressing and questioning the ongoing centralisation of the white body in a black context.

During her upcoming research trip, Zoë will resume artistic research around these topics and hopes to open dialogue with the current generation of critically thinking, context-reflecting Ghanaian artists. She explains: “For me, going back to Ghana is to follow the trail of the epistemological correlations that have just begun to formulate themselves and to concretize them. I’m not sure what this will mean for my artistic work in the long run, and that’s exactly what excites me about it – to be on to something that opens up new territory and relations for me, and challenges and questions my artistic approach. While at the same time tying into a larger discourse around decolonisation and what role art can play in that complex task.”

Zoë intends to spend time working at the experimental contemporary art incubator blaxTARLINES within the Painting and Sculpture Department of KNUST, Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, as well as visit the Savanna Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA) in Tamale, and other places engaging with contemporary arts. During her trip, Zoë will host performance art drawing workshops with local students. She describes the workshops –Synaesthesia in the arts: Experimental Documentation – as creating a reciprocal concentration and presence between herself and the artists towards what is happening in the moment.

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, aka crazinisT artisT (currently supported on a residency in Bern) will provide mentorship on the project and Martin Toloku will assist with photography and video documentation.

BIOGRAPHY

Zoë Binetti runs the Sinnestheaterstudio in Bern – a research space for sensorial theatre dedicated to the exploration of shifting epistemologies through movement and sound. At the Sinnestheaterstudio they develop their dance theatre and music performances, teach queer animist performance practice, and make artistic research in the thematic field of relations between sensory perception, mind and movement. Zoë performs, teaches and lives a passionate performance art woven from visceral poetry of bodies, objects and space. Her practice is inspired by traditions where healing ceremonies and good entertainment where often one and the same thing, performed by ‘sacred clowns’. Her works are multi-layered, queer, wack, full of love for our living and dying with a damaged earth and accessible from various angles. She performs in alleyways, forests, broken and unseen places as well as more traditional theatre settings.