Into the Wilderness

Constanza Bizraelli & Piotr Bockowski 

The performance proposed savage physiological strategies to conceptually incorporate nature into the city environment, re-appropriating base-materiality through the transformation of the performer into an urban-feral agent. A later transformation of the piece “Into the Wilderness” reformulated the act adapting it to an underground space, evoking the symbolism of the telluric interior of the earth. Here, the act executed by the urban-feral character served as a rite for the opening of a new abstract space: the entrails of the wasteland or the intimacy of the wasteland. A transplant onto a different symbolic realm would take place as the performers oscillated between the opening of new possibilities of rooting and uprooting, and the mute encounter with groundlessness. 

The piece was performed for the first time as an urban intervention at Brick Lane communal gardens in London in 2015. After this first act, two additional acts took place but this time in the Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan, during the Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origins Performance Series between 2015 and 2016 co-curated by Constanza Bizraelli, Piotr Bockowski, Luke Jordan and Richard Crow.