Michala Julinyova in collaboration with Erlira Latifi at Summer School as School 2022
August 12, 2022
Venue: Boxing Club

Michala Julinyova & Erlira Latifi: “Dans une vallée profonde”

Through choreographed and improvised dance, sound, gestures and by manipulating sculptures, two performers create metaphorical scenes with multiple possible readings. Evoking images of Slovakian past and it´s memorials, performance is a reflection on tools of repeated systemic violence.

The sound is a very important element of the piece. It begins by singing a song “Dans une vallée profonde” (In a deep valley) with metric changes, then, in the second part the sound becomes the expression of breathing, rhythmed and dynamized by movements of performers´ bodies.

Michala Julínyová studied painting in Banska Bystrica, Slovakia and then in The École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon - ENSBA Lyon - National School of Fine Arts De Lyon, in France. She is a member of the research group Contemporary Art and Historical Temporalities at ENSBA Lyon.

In her work, Michala Julínyová observes the relationship that the human has with her/his history and her/his environment. Through interaction with tangible places chosen on the basis of their cultural and political stratification, Michala Julínyová builds symbolic scenes and forms. In this way, and beyond political discourse, her practice becomes a question of reflecting contemporary phenomena that manifest themselves in Slovakia and Central Europe.

Erlira Latifi, born 1990 in Prishtina, Kosovo, is an artist whose work is informed by her travels and interests in personal and social identity. Born to a family of engineers, her own creative trajectory has been informed by questions of tradition and order in contrast to novelty and expressivity. Embodied practices such as dance and surfing have deeply informed her own practice, whereby she appreciates movement as a non-symbolic conduit to affect and imagination. In her work, Latifi seeks to render ‘dead values’ such as patriotism, nationalism, and religion new by proposing performative interventions that undo and reformulate rigid and calcified orders of meaning. Presently, she lives and works in Portugal, where she soon plans to open her first art studio to enter into a full time arts practice.