Zygote is project where performance artists, fashion designers, musicians and researchers in foetal development are working together. Zygote is a mobile laboratory that moves between different Swedish urban and natural locations. The work is a collective investigation, where the audience is actively involved in shaping the results.
The process does not result in a final performance, instead the working group conducts a series of ongoing investigations together with different audience groups. We call these proto-performances. This makes the work an ongoing and investigative process.
- In the Zygote experience a small audience group (6-8 people) travel by minibus to pools, rivers, lakes or to bays of the sea.
- Here, the audience is invited to “find their way back to” the foetal stage while their bodies are immersed in water. They are led through these experimental water exercises by a choreographer. Together with her they develop new ways of experiencing their own bodies. They do so by investigating movements that the foetus performs during its development in the womb.
- To make the proto-performance process possible, a fashion designer creates wet suits that the audience wears in the water. The goal is not to create aesthetic costumes, but to create suits so that the audience can experience new bodily experiences. The suit also has a semi-permeable and stretchy cocoon-like “foetal membrane” and other features that help them find their way back to the womb. This creates limitations for the audience which in turn enables new bodily experiences.
- With Zygote the working group also develops hardware and software to work with sound in innovative ways. They are developed to create sounds similar to what the foetus hears in the womb. The goal is to work with the tactile quality of sounds (which the audience feels underwater). We work with underwater speakers and develop special digital interfaces. What leads to innovative sound expressions? What can musicians and composers learn from this experience?
The project is developed by Curatorial Mutiny in close collaboration with Vision Forum. It is supported by Kulturbryggan in Stockholm.