Das Arts, Amsterdam presents Lindy Annis‘ latest work about the iconography of passion and the body-archive.
„Warburgs Memo“
Conzept: Lindy Annis
with: Lindy Annis, Antonia Baehr, Nicholas Bussmann
for further information: www.brakkegrond.nl and www.dasarts.nl
Starting at Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, Annis uses the art historian’s theories and methods to develope her own performative atlas investigating the survival of ancient culture in today’s world. Together with the dramaturg Antonia Baehr and the composer Nicholas Bussmann, she investigates the concept of the body as archive for memories (personal, collective and cultural) and iconic body gestures as the expression there of.
From 1924 until his death in 1929, Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, in which he analysed the continuing presence of ancient culture in the iconic gesture language and image memory of European civilisation. Warburg took photographs of images, reproductions from books and visual materials from newspapers and/or daily life and attached them on wooden panels covered with black cloth, arranging them in such a way that they illustrated one or several thematic ideas. The perpetual metamorphosis of the panels was intentional and only halted by Warburg’s death in 1929.
In Lindy Annis’ Warburg’s Memo the picture-panels (Bildtafeln) are the basis for staged panel-works (Bildtafel-Stücke). Expanded into life, they are translated from the visual into the verbal, gestural and performative form. Lecture, play-acting and guided tour show the way through Warburg’s intricate thought process. The audience moves through the theoretical ‘thought-space’ (Denkraum), making their way along his‚ pathos formulas’, swinging between the Apollonic and the Dyonisian, the intellectual and the magical, the past and the present day; between the memory fragments of Aby Warburg and Lindy Annis.