A performance and exhibition by Nicola Genovese.
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi.

With: They Die, Dustin Kenel, Patricia Meier, Dauen Park, Maria Sabato, Thembeka Sincuba
Sculptures production assistant: Ricardo Meli
Light design: Imanol Egea
External eye: Ketty Ghnassia
Co-production: Fabriktheater Rote Fabrik
Funded by: Stadt Zürich Kultur, Ernst Göhner Stiftung, Walter Haefner Stiftung

Where: Toxi Space, Zimmerlistrasse 48004 Zurich
When: 2-3-6-7-9 December 2023 at 20:00
Duration: approx. 60 minutes
The stage can be visited from December 3 to 11, from 4 to 7pm, by appointment only.
toxi@toxi.space | www.toxi.space

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Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In a post-capitalist and perhaps post-war Europe, the CEO of an unnamed corporation presents a new product. It is called Warp, a digital service that enables manipulation of the space-time continuum and access to a new Lebensform. It promises to dissolve nostalgia and the ambiguous passions that tinge the future into the fold of an endless present.

Part speculative science-fiction and part Commedia dell’arte, Desireless takes the viewer into the depths of this temporal dimension. Through a blend of monologues, choreography, and live music, the performance by Nicola Genovese, curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, exposes the masks, codes, and feelings of a semi-privileged humanity, torn between the remnants of a late-imperial world, the bondage of a technocratic hell, and the fantasy of a biomedical Nirvana.

The work itself is conceived as a machine of doubt and indistinction. In creating Desireless, Nicola Genovese has collaborated with artists Dustin Kenel, Patricia Meier, Dauen Park, Maria Sabato, Thembeka Sincuba, the goth rock band They Die, and various artificial intelligence apps. The stage/exhibition space thus coincides with the action field of a partially non-human collective mind that extends beyond the individual identity of the artist. Video installations and sculptures become props and vice versa, depending on how they are activated. They transcend the boundaries between theatre and visual arts.

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