HOW TO: Oh, look at me

Mimeisthai is an experimental screendance that responds to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘mimetic faculty’, which is, the ability to perceive and/or reproduce similarity. This generic skill is possessed by all living things and finds expression on various levels, from the biological to the behavioral; such as in reproduction or camouflage, to the myriad ways that creatures communicate.

In Mimeisthai movements are shared, copied and repeated between performers both on and off-screen, and then amplified across multiple frames. Through duplication, repetition, and layering multiple exposures, this work explores the mimetic faculty of dance and digital video.

A figure of a black Tito appears in the big and empty underground structure of a former silo in Tamale, Ghana. He visits the people of the country by plane and rickshaw to spread his message and joins the Parliament of Ghosts in session. An artistic interaction between NAM – Non Aligned Movement by Christian Guerematchi and the Parliament of Ghosts by Ibrahim Mahama. Both works speak about forgotten histories and the contemporary echoes of the cultural connections from the time of the Non-Aligned Movement between Ghana and Yugoslavia – Nkrumah and Tito.

Inspired by hydrofeminist theories and wearing a vessel suit, full of leaking water, artist Elisabeth Raymond tells an otherworldly story about sorrow, the plastic in our oceans and how our borders are fluid.