Unfolding Images: Notes on image analysis and choreography in the frame of Ad Extra

Abstract

Abstract

The performance Ad Extra, created by Beatriz Cantinho and Tulio Rosa in 2019, addresses the political legacies of the fall of the Berlin Wall and its implication on contemporary european border and migration policies. The work departs from the relationship between two different images and two different events: the first, a 1989 photograph from the sequence of events known as the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the second, a 2014 Reuters’ photograph that depicts a collective attempt to cross the border fence that separates the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco.

Working within the visual and symbolic complexity of both images, and through a series of performative operations, Ad Extra rescales and repositions the different elements presented on both images producing a cognitive diagram in which the meaning, significance, allegiances and embedded discourse of both photographs become evident.

In the present article we seek to understand the ways in which Ad Extra’s conceptual, choreographic and operative modes can be perceived as a form of choreographic thinking, or an ‘ontological device’ that can help us grasp and understand aspects of reality. We focus on the compositional methods elaborated in the intersection between image analysis and choreography and on the notions of abstraction and scale as constitutive elements of our practice. Through the lenses of contemporary theories on image, dance and philosophy, we observe how Ad Extra’s choreographic strategies propose to unfold the image in its complexity, operating within its narratives and information in order to question the dynamics of power and politics of representation embedded in it.