[Backslash Festival is proud to announce its first Artist in Residence programme. After several years, we are finally able to enable and fund this programme that we wished to start already years ago. For this Artist in Residence programme, we invited the Zurich-based artist Ula Liagaitė to continue her research together with other artists of her choice within this framework. The Artist in Residence programme has a duration of two weeks in a studio at Gessnerallee, followed by a sharing/performance during the first night of the festival.]
My practice began in my (sick) body and continues to unfold through collaborations that shape visceral realities, where I look for knowledge beyond certainty. I look at the (human) body as something that can \"fix\" itself if given the appropriate care and conditions. This idea can be brought to various contexts and applied to different structures, such as family, education and health care systems, society etc. This pattern of thought is inspired by Johanna Hedva, a contemporary artist, writer, and musician, and driven by an ongoing interest in various healing practices and conversations about what it means to be healthy and to \"keep going\".
During the two weeks of the residency, we will be drawing from our ongoing research on STRETCHING EXERCISES TO FEEL CLIMATE CHANGE. This research comes from a place of discomfort. We will work with text, sound and movement in order to dive deeper into a pressing question — if climate collapse is not a passing crisis but the beginning of a new reality — irreversible, already unfolding, how to live with it? And who is allowed to shape that life, especially when power and resources are concentrated in the hands of a few in control of the global capital?
Our strategy of working together and as resistance began by refusing both paralysis and technocratic doomsday narratives that foreclose imagination. Instead of seeking control or resolution, this research embraces emotional engagement, not-knowing, and staying with discomfort. By creating space to feel, speak, and move with the trouble, we queer the imaginations of the future, seeking to open them to multiplicity, embodiment, and collective presence.
Born in Lithuania, Ula Liagaitė (she/her) is a dancer, choreographer and actress working and living between Argentina, Switzerland and Lithuania, with a Bachelor’s degree in contemporary dance from The Northern School of Contemporary Dance in England. She currently is obtaining her Master’s degree in Transdisciplinary Arts at Zurich University of the Arts.
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