Gravity Pieces

Everything moves towards everything else. This is the doing of one of the fundamental forces in physics, gravitation, or mass attraction. It causes things to effect mutual attraction – not because they fit together well, but rather because they are falling in the same direction. Tiny particles and heavy lumps, fine fabrics and sticky bodies – they all coalesce into a reluctant disarray or a still life. Rotterdam Presenta moves non-human actors into the centre of their artistic work. In Gravity Pieces, they combine physics and poetry. With the means of choreography, music, and object art, they put everyday objects and human bodies into motion and watch the powers they unfold. They found the fictitious “Aerobic Life Institute”, inviting their audience to a shared trial of gravity. Bodies, plastic cups, helium-filled balloons, tools, and air cushions fall, topple, or tumble over each other, in time overwriting the room.

Gravity Pieces is part of the “complicity with active materials” series in which Rotterdam Presenta explored the performativity of materials, surfaces, and objects in the year 2020/2021.