Gabriela Löffel

Nous n’avons pas besoin de nous connaître à l’avance

High definition colour video, without sound, 19'56'', 2024

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Nous n’avons pas besoin de nous connaître à l’avance is a hybrid video work that alternates moments of dance performance with archive footage and textual quotations. Gabriela Löffel draws on the political aspect of public space to construct her thinking, developing a kind of visual essay that stages the ‘performativity of bodies in this zone of political action’. Drawing on the written work of Judith Butler, a US philosopher and gender theorist who has worked extensively on the question of the body and its normalised representativeness in contemporary society, Löffel gives real corporeality to the issues raised by the author. Quotations from Butler’s work are shown alongside the danced and archival elements of the video. By offering a multiplicity of images, as well as a double point of view on the dancers, the artist echoes the principle of inclusivity evoked in Butler’s theory. The almost fixed camera allows us to examine in detail the slow, precise movements of the dancers. Its movements are almost imperceptible, so subtle are they. The artist and the choreographer Cédric Gagneur worked closely together to define the various movements that make up the choreography: they propose an abstraction of gestures of resistance or revolt, drawn from archive images from the collection of the Archives contestataires de Genève. The piece is inhabited by slowness and silence, giving the body enough space to unfold individually or collectively. The work offers a dialectic of the potential for protest in the public space.

Excerpts from:
Judith Butler, Notes Toward A Performative Theory of Assembly, © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Published by arrangement with Harvard University Press.
Rassemblement : pluralité, performativité et politique, French translation by Christophe Jaquet, © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2016.

With:
Cédric Gagneur
Ivan Larson
Margaux Monetti
Akané Nussbaum
Marc Oosterhoff
Blaise Porquet
Julia Rieder

Choreography:
Cédric Gagneur

Archive images:
Archives contestataires Genève

Filmed at Pavillon ADC, Geneva

Camera:
Alexa Andrey, Frédéric Choffat

Gabriela Löffel thanks:
Judith Butler
Archives contestataires Genève
ADC Association pour la Danse Contemporaine Genève
Collectif BreakFree Suisse
All participants

Co-produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain and the Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville de Genève for the Mire program