Carte Blanche brings to life an immersive installation built and choreographed by the visual artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña. The company’s 14 dancers perform in a hybrid between performance, visual art and dance.

SOLIDS plays with our sense of space and challenges our notions of safety and history. What happens when the structures you trust are in a state of permanent dissolution? And, what happens to time when one is sitting still while everything around is in a state of constant flux?

SOLIDS is an integrated art experience where the mix between performance and exhibition melts into each other. The collaboration between Gómez-Egaña and Carte Blanche challenges the concept of what a dance performance can be. The installation moves, peels off layers and reveals itself. Elements are mirrored, moved, stretched, knotted, and dissolved. The dancers make things happen: they move the walls, manipulate objects and give energy and presence to a dynamic space that is constantly evolving.

“Solids” is a meditation on the fact that everything that seems solid and lasting in actuality is fragile and temporary. The title also refers to Marshall Berman’s book “All that is Solid melts into air” (itself a quote from Karl Marx). The book is about the experience of modernity as a reality where nothing is stable and nothing is what it seems.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Pedro Gómez-Egaña was born in Colombia and lives and works in Oslo, where in addition to his artistic work he is a professor of sculpture and installation at the Norwegian Academy of the Arts (KhiO). His work has been staged in Norway and internationally on prestigious platforms and renowned biennials.

His sculptures, installations and video works take a critical look at contemporary and historical technology and explore how they define our experience and understanding of time. This includes an interest in the mechanical, the intersection of the industrial and the mysterious, as well as the emotional, sexual and spiritual undertones of digital culture.

His work reflects a concern about how our networked and media-driven world reduces the diversity of attention. He focuses on this theme by producing specially built rooms that seek to transform the audience’s way of experiencing a situation or story. His work often reflects concrete stories about the place where it is shown.

Videos

Trailer

Short interview with Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Artist talk with Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Artistic Director Annabelle Bonnéry and Director of the KODE Museums Peter Snare (English with Norwegian subtitles)