Snake Lake_Island Wilding

Ru Kim
14th of June 2024 – performance

MEETING POINT
Atelier di Benoit Bouhier, via Trento 1, Ameno (NO)
From 4PM

All activities are free. To participate we advise you to sign up, we will keep you updated.

Artistic residency 1st of June – 15th of June 2024 – Ameno

Snake Lake_Island Wilding speaks to the snakes about the land we cannot know, namely the Island of Orta but the one of the past, the one existing before St. Julius arrived.
Ru Kim’s project is a performance that takes place between water and land setting a speculative narrative about the myth of St. Julius and the removal of the snakes from the island. Through this poetics, the artist wants to rethink the world of “savage” and “civilization” painted in the common imagination by religious rhetoric. Starting from research on hydro-feminism, a feminist positioning on the study of water as a vital resource and element of body and identitarian fluidity, the performance questions the animality of the snakes involved in the legend and imagines that they were actual human beings. Colonial processes, meaning of occupation and conquest, require forms of dehumanization of the subjects to attempt justifying violence. What is there to be found in that distance between the feared unreachable island and those watching from the shore? What aquatic entities witness it all?

Credits:
Concept and creation: Ru Kim | Performers: Ru Kim and Matteo Frasca | Sound engineer: Artur Pispalhas | Costumes: collaboration with Jiun Koo.

BIO
Ru Kim was born in Hamburg in 1995 and grew up in transit between Germany, Cyprus, Korea, Canada and Brazil, before moving to France to pursue their studies in art. They obtained a fine art bachelor and master’s degree with honors (DNSEP, félicitations du jury) at the École Supérieure d’Art et Design, Grenoble. Ru currently lives and works in Seoul. They research into using art to resist normalized and embodied sexism and racist violence generated by patriarchal, imperial, and colonial ideologies of domination. Using various media such as video, photography, sound, performance, installation, and text, they seek to develop forms that challenge binarism and fixed identities. They create aesthetic situations in which the viewers are transformed into participants, and physically experience a political awareness of their own implications in the logic of domination.

Ph. Seungwook Yang