Salon Souterrain: Confort Out rejects the concept of perfection in favour of scars and creative repairs. They offer a robust and tenacious approach to occupying space and attention — a subversion of vulnerability that is widely accepted. In a world saturated with filtered images and ephemeral products, Salon Souterrain: Confort Out critiques the cult of perfection imposed by social media and accelerated consumerism. They invite us to embrace personal, social, and ecological flaws as signs of authenticity, as an alternative to hyper-productivity and rapid obsolescence. Salon Souterrain: Confort Out offers a critical approach to rethinking our relationship with the world.
The Salon Souterrain, initiated by artist Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe, is a series of events that addresses social issues in an artistic format. The project space becomes an open space that is simultaneously a stage, an exhibition, and a meeting place.
Discussions, performances, music, and artistic experiments give rise to new connections and perspectives. The Salon not only creates social encounters, but also questions issues such as territoriality, belonging, and the decentralization of art and culture. It is a place where artistic fiction opens up boundaries—both symbolic and real.
artistic direction: Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe
performance/music: giggidalessio duo (Stefano D’Alessio, Luigi Guerrieri)
performance/Dance: Zoé-Afan Strasser
art: Noémi Kiss
DJ: Ojay Morgan
team: Indra Jäger (production), Benoît Jouan (research), François Ntambue Tambwe (web), David Pujadas Bosch (documentation)
Kindly supported by Stadt Wien MA7
Salon Souterrain by Dig Up Productions
In cooperation with WUK performing arts / Projektraum, Château Rouge and AIL/Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab




BIOS
giggidalessio duo
After years spent fantasising about it, ANGST is the debut project of the giggidalessio duo—an experiment blending performance, poetry, music, text, and new media. The combined practices of the two artists are crystallised around the topic of fear (Angst in German).
Existential fears, nonsensical fears, red-scare fears, political fears, stupid fears, material fears, fear of clichés, fear of differences, fear of admitting who we are, what we like, and what we dislike. Even fear of being too entertaining, too funny, too stupid, or not conceptual enough. AHHHH!
ANGST is a concert-performance in which the audience is invited to laugh, sing along, headbang, and dance.
Zoé-Afan Strasser
Zoé-Afan Strasser is a Viennese-Ghanaian dancer and choreographer based in Vienna who works in the fields of classical ballet, contemporary dance, and interdisciplinary performance. She trained at the Vienna State Opera Ballet School and the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna, where she graduated with honors with a BA in dance in 2018. She then continued her studies at the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program in San Francisco. Since 2019, she has been working as a freelance artist and dance teacher in Vienna. Her choreographic work Mell brwn was shown at the International Solo Dance Theater Festival in Stuttgart. Her artistic practice often involves interdisciplinary collaborations with artists such as Erwin Wurm, Shake Stew, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, and Afropolitan Berlin. She has danced in pieces by choreographers such as Akemi Takeya, Maurya Kerr, Kiani del Valle, Alonzo King, Simon Mayer, Antony Rizzi, Virginie Roy-Nigl, and Esther Balfe. In 2025, she collaborated with visual artist Carola Dertnig on the performance Move on the Move at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and celebrated the world premiere of Transient Shifts, a science fiction piece choreographed by Akemi Takeya, at ImPulsTanz.
Noémi Kiss
Textiles, Space, and Perception
Noémi Kiss is an Austrian visual artist, architect, and philosopher living in Austria. She was born in 1969 in Székelykeresztúr (Transylvania, Romania) and completed a master’s degree in architecture at the Vienna University of Technology as well as a master’s degree in philosophy at the University for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Since 2013, she has worked as a freelance artist at the intersection of contemporary art, design, and architecture. In her material-based practice, she transforms everyday objects and familiar materials – in particular Persian carpets, textiles, concrete, and industrial materials – into sculptural works that question perception, value, and cultural attribution. Her works oscillate between concept and sensory experience and open new perspectives on materiality, memory, and form.
From 2011 to 2013, she worked together with the architect Andreas Reichl under the name KISSTHEREICHL, including on the series Carpeted Carpets.
Her works have been presented nationally and internationally in renowned exhibition and art/design contexts, including Ausstellungshaus Spoerri, ZONAMACO / Design Mexico City, the Museum Villa Rot, and Kunsthalle Gießen (Germany), as well as in numerous other exhibitions in Austria and Europe. In 2026, she is invited to participate in the Biennale Internazionale Donna.
Ojay Morgan
Ojay Morgan is a DJ whose sound lives at the intersection of underground culture, fashion, and atmosphere. With a refined instinct for tension and release, he curates immersive sets that favor depth over excess and feeling over spectacle. Blending hip hop, house, afrobeats, amapiano, and global rhythms, his selections unfold with intention, creating a space that feels intimate, elevated, and subtly disruptive. Designed for discerning rooms and conscious listeners, Ojay Morgan’s approach aligns seamlessly with environments where sound, style, and presence matter.
Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe (host/artistic direction/she/her)
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.
www.elitambwe.com
www.chateaurouge.at
Indra Jäger (production)
Indra Jäger, born in Frankfurt am Main, has lived in Vienna since 2000. After studying journalism and communication sciences, she co-founded and directed the arts and culture association IM ERSTEN (2012–16). She continues to work in this field as a producer for Dig Up Productions. She is responsible for the discursive performance format Salon Souterrain as well as Speech of Love: Absence and Beyond The Overflow. In 2023, Indra joined the Austrian solution journalism platform relevant.news as an editor and department head and began working as an independent research assistant at the Institute for Comparative Media and Communication Studies (CMC).
Benoît Jouan (recherche)
Benoît Jouan is an author and illustrator. He studied fine arts and holds a university degree (Master’s in Visual and Fine Arts/University of Lille III, France) and an art school diploma (National Higher Diploma in Fine Arts-DNSEP & National Diploma in Fine Arts-DNAP from the École de Tourcoing, France). He worked for twenty years (1999-2019) at the Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Raw Art of Lille Métropole (LaM) in Villeneuve-d’Ascq (France) as a lecturer and art workshop facilitator (specialising in engraving) in closed environments such as psychiatric hospitals and prisons. He has been working with Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe since 1998. Since 2022, he has been living and working in Vienna.
David Pujadas Bosch (documentation)
David Pujadas Bosch was born in Barcelona and has lived in Vienna since 2000. From 2000 to 2013, he worked at IBM Austria in various areas (advertisement support consultant, quality coordinator, national focal point, among others). From 2003 to 2013, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Monica Bonvicini (sculpture and performance art) and Harun Farocki (film and art). Since 2013, he has been taking film classes with Thomas Heise. Works primarily with video and film, but also engages in photography, drawing, writing, and the creation of performances and sound installations. From 2009 to 2016, he regularly illustrated, wrote and kept accounts for Paradigmata – Journal for People and Discourse – among other editorial activities such as layout, editing and distribution.
https://davidpujadasbosch.wordpress.com



