The performance HIDING THIS PALE OBJECT OF DESIRE, A PLEASURE combines movements, images, and sounds and places them in new contexts. Everyday objects such as a table or a chair become tools for experimenting with intimacy, cooking, and sexuality. The centre of the exploration is the mouth. Actions are repeated and changed. They no longer serve their usual purpose and can be understood in different ways. What we see on stage is never fully clear and triggers constantly new associations.
A table. A mouth. Materials worked to the point of exhaustion, where the boundaries between everyday life and cooking, intimacy and sexuality are broken open.
HIDING THIS PALE OBJECT OF DESIRE, A PLEASURE restages gestures borrowed from cooking – crushing, chewing, spreading – and pushes into different contexts. The rhythm in the piece falters, actions overflow, no longer serving any recognisable purpose.
What might belong to eating shifts into new, ambivalent constellations. What is seen is never unambiguous; images cling to surfaces and, as fragmented impressions, challenge the audience to navigate through different perspectives and assemble fragments.
At the same time, the soundscape brings the audience into immediate proximity with what unfolds on stage: meanings and references overlap. What is heard resists being assigned to a single context.
HIDING THIS PALE OBJECT OF DESIRE, A PLEASURE does not aim to clarify, but to sustain a state of friction between useful gesture and excess, between attraction and discomfort.
CREDITS:
Artistic direction, concept, costumes and performance: Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe
Video assistance and stage design: David Pujadas Bosch
Music and sound composition: Ursula Winterauer
Lighting design: Sveta Schwin
©Photo: Marcus Gradwohl
BIOS
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe
Born in Kinshasa (DRC), Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe grew up in France and pursued artistic studies. In 1998, she obtained the “Diplôme National d’Expression Plastique”, for her work of sculpture, at the School of Fine Arts in Tourcoing, France.
As an artist, choreographer and stage director, she works with a variety of forms of writing: performance, choreography, film, interactive and generative, as well as different dramaturgies and spaces such as installations and stages. She is interested in the emergence of new forms of otherness, and the singular relationships and languages they give rise to. What do they reveal about our humanity, and how do they challenge the notion of anthropocentrism? Her projects are transdisciplinary and collective, and seek to invent shared research spaces between performance art and the social sciences.
Tambwe’s choreographic and performative works explore the multiplicity of perspectives shaping reality. Her scenographic devices destabilize conventional perception, fragmenting bodies, spaces and narratives. Through performance she reveals ambiguities within social, political and aesthetic conventions, staging the contradictions and incoherent positions that shape contemporary subjectivity. Her work frequently draws on philosophical and literary sources, notably the writings of Roland Barthes, exploring fragmentation, perception and the instability of meaning.
David Pujadas Bosch (video- assistent and documentation / Video- Assistenz und Dokumentation)
David Pujadas Bosch (he/him), born in Barcelona, has lived in Vienna since 2000. After studying Economics at the University of Barcelona and working at IBM Austria, he pursued fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Monica Bonvicini, Harun Farocki, Thomas Heise, and Emily Wardill.
His practice focuses on video and film, alongside theatre, photography, animation, drawing, performance, and sound installation. He collaborates with numerous artists and works across disciplines within contemporary art and culture.
He has contributed to Paradigmata – Magazine for People and Discourses and worked in various roles in film production, primarily in camera and editing. His work also includes documenting performances, exhibitions, and symposia, as well as producing short films, music videos, and video installations for institutions such as the Vitra Design Museum, 21er Haus, and the Austrian Commission for UNESCO.
Ursula Winterauer (music /Musik)
Ursula Winterauer, alias Gischt, lives and works in Vienna as a composer, electronic music producer, and curator. Her eclectic soundscapes offer nuanced interpretations of the genres industrial, techno, and ambient, reflected through bass guitar, synthesizers, and clouds of electrosmog. Her work engages with raw and brutal sounds in a state of digital overdetermination, often contrasted by the clear character of her own voice. She is the bassist of the doom metal band Eaeres and one half of the duo The Answer is No with Maja Osojnik. Winterauer develops pieces for ensembles, works as a sound designer and film composer and creates compositions for contemporary dance. She is the co-founder and label head of Ventil Records, co-organizer and commercial director of the Unsafe+Sounds Festival, and was the curator of New Salt – Festival for Sonic Exploration & Digital Art in 2024.
