“Domesticated Spectacle (Simulation)” is the continuation of a performance piece first realized in Yerevan in 2018. One of the performance’s points of reference was the Armenian Velvet Revolution which took place in Yerevan in spring 2018. The work included setting off fireworks inside an abandoned building and was accompanied by a manifesto-like poem inspired by Guy Debord’s writings. The explosions within the architecture became an excessive, inverted metaphor for freedom.
The new version created for Rencontres Internationales Loods6/Amsterdam brings the intervention into an exhibition space. Fireworks are replaced by spark machines, haze, and sound. The audience is separated from the action by glass walls, allowed to witness the action closely while being excluded from it by the display window barriers. The tamed fire explosions are not only domesticated but simulated — an image of their own taming, just as the mediated spectacle we consume daily through our devices. The performance raises the question of what kind of reaction a simulated spectacle can provoke in its audience. What feelings and equations are inscribed here, and what meaning unfolds this transformation?
Biography
Alisa Berger was born in 1987 in Makhachkala (Republic of Dagestan, Russia) and raised in Lviv (Ukraine) until immigration with her family to Essen (Germany) in 1995. She studied at KHM Cologne and Le Fresnoy. She works with films and installations, often in a collaborative process. Drawing inspiration from her migrational background, she reflects on ongoing and historical divisions and changes through her unique perspective. Alisa is particularly interested in exploring the body, and tensions between its physical presence and its feedback to technological processes that alter it. The resulting works are sensory experiences that stimulate memories or collective sensations through staged and ambiguous arrangements. She was nominated for the Max Ophüls Prize and the FIRST STEPS Award and received the Studio Collector Prize of Isabelle & Jean-Conrad Lemaître and Haro Cumbusyan at Jeu de Paume in 2023. Her works have been shown at Eye Filmmuseum, Jeu de Paume, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, CWB Paris, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and Kindl Berlin, as well as at Berlinale, IDFA, CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, among others.
