Time Smuggler

Artist and choreographer Isabel Lewis returns to Ocean Space after her exhibition-performance “O.C.E.A.N.I.C.A. (Occasions Creating Ecologically Attuned Narratives in Collective Action) performed in 2021.

Together with students from the Fine Art Academy in Leipzig, Lewis brings to the stage “Time Smuggler,” a performance that explores the materialities of the constructed and conditioned zones of the body and the Venetian urban space.

The performance is also open to a group of participants who will be selected through an open call and will be able to participate in a free workshop led by Isabel Lewis on Friday, October 11 and Saturday, October 12. Want to participate? Find out how to apply here.

A sequence enacted in urban spacetime two times. Organized in collaboration with Klasse für Performative Künste and Friends (Fine Art Academy Leipzig)

The doors tightened as we went through, tracing the canals in which time flows, seeking to unleash the logic of dream, to exist equally on both sides of the awakening. TIME SMUGGLER is an invitation to drift between a few layers of time and space, to experience an urban space with a different sensation of weight, joy, and purpose while working with the body alone as a building material. We explore multiple possibilities for processing reality, approaching it through a new framework that regards the space between bodies (both human and nonhuman) as a site for transformation. Following paths and ladders that emerge and disappear between waking and dreaming, we greet you here, between thing and transition.

Isabel Lewis presented her exhibition- performance “O.C.E.A.N.I.C.A. (Occasions Creating Ecologically Attuned Narratives in Collective Action)” at Ocean Space in 2021 as part of the exhibition the Soul Expanding Ocean curated by Chus Martinez. As a dancer and choreographer, Isabel Lewis’s 
(born 1981 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) socio-choreographic practice is a strategy of response to space, time, architecture, and situation.Trained in dance, philosophy, and literary criticism, Lewis creates works that resist classification, affirming pleasure, connection, and permeability and proposing alternative forms of sociality between people and the biosocial surround. Lewis employs an expanded sense of the choreographic; she generates affective bodily experiences that address all of the senses in her inherently collaborative practice. Her terminology for many of her works is occasions: celebratory gatherings of things, people, plants, dances and smells and other compositions in which the dramaturgy of the moment is composed in real time. Her works have been presented internationally in biennials and solo exhibitions as well as in music, theater, and dance festivals. She is a co-founder of Bodysnatch, a diverse community of dancers and DJs that gathered monthly between 2011-2021 to get down on Tuesdays at Kotbusser Tor’s Monarch. Lewis is a professor at the Fine Art Academy (HGB), Leipzig, leading the Class for Performative Arts since 2021.

The Klasse für Performative Künste and Friends is a constellation of students and professional artists engaged in a body-based research practice. The group was formed within the Media Art department of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and expands to include practitioners from multiple classes and departments, as well as other schools and cities. We work toward the development of new forms of aesthetic experience, by experimenting with modes of presentation of performance in multiple formats.