With & by Lan Cao, Clémentine Coupau, Gailė Griciūtė, Aki Kitajima, Melanie Matthieu, Thùy-Hân Nguyễn-Chí, Gregor Siedl

How to not begin?
How to explore the potential productivity of collective hesitation as a way to refuse mastery?
How to turn contradictions into contrasts?
How are we affected by all the things we cannot perceive?
How to evoke the unknown, the unseen, the invisible?

Soft Shoulders, Macroscore:

‘Soft Shoulders’ is not a concert or a performance; it’s a bewildering suggestion. It is not interested in politics of participation, nor in a shapeshifting ping-pong between spotlight and aside, figure and ground – rather we want to explore a collective magnetic sensing (and thus exceed our human condition) based on an experimental, non-idealistic striving to a point of strange equality.

Exhaustion, the initial introduction of an all-ineffable loss, a processual formulation of a new cosmology, a whole earth perspective…are just a few plausible scenarios to aid the formation of the aforementioned equality – which should not be understood as a hypothetic or social project, but rather as a disarming destabilization of superiority, fixed landmarks and hard truths.

It is a doubtful, ultra messy sonic landscape sensitive to, and inhibited by both visible and non-visible, perceptible and non-perceptible realms. Navigation here is playful and guided, not by cardinal directions, but by sensory adventures, with a focus on auditory experience.

SOFT SHOULDERS is part of the ‘kitchen show’ series of exhibitions and performances curated by Felix Bröcker. The collective sonic experiment – which was conducted by musicians and non-musicians, exploring food, liquids, everyday objects, and various instruments such as piano, cello, saxophone as sound sources – took place in the Lichthalle at Städelschule Frankfurt a.M. in May 2016.

Soft Shoulders, Microscore I and II: