An interdisciplinary performance · Conceived and directed by Onye Ozuzu

"A carcass leaves an imprint of a version of us we are no longer, a 'skin,' a container that we have left behind."

Space Carcasses

The Work

Space Carcasses is an interdisciplinary performance made in collaboration with filmmaker Simon Rouby, painter Native Maqari, musician Ben LaMar Gay, and dancer Joshua Akubo Gabriel. The work rests on a foundation of improvisational movement research engaged in the corners of buildings — utilizing the three planes of a building's corner as a container within which to develop a movement repertoire and methodology for embodied engagement with architectural sites.

This process is mirrored and extended by project collaborators using 3D video mapping, site-specific sound experiments, impulse recordings, and more to multiply the physical, visceral experience of sensing the body's extension into architecture.

Geographically disparate, yet historically interconnected sites were engaged in site-specific improvisations and then interfaced in technologically mediated live performance to re-contextualize and re-remember the contested Afro-Diasporic relationship between the vaults on Factors Row in Savannah, Georgia, the architecture of Cape Verde, Abuja, Nigeria, and the ephemeral layer of Saharan dust traveling over the island on the eastern trade winds.

Corner study · [location, year]

Space Carcasses gathers experience embedded in the walls of hundreds of years old buildings separated by oceans and floating in the dust of thousands of years of the earth redistributing itself… and asserts the body's capacity to wear it all, what we made, what was made of us, where we were, where we are. Like a garment. And like a garment, also perhaps, to take it off.

The work explores being as a trans-space-time experience. An aging building presents an opportunity to explore materiality through time… it is time travel that we can touch, lean on, push against, sense its presence with our eyes closed, be sheltered by.

Onye Ozuzu

An Africanist World View

Onye Ozuzu's work operates within an Africanist world view that assumes a circularity of time; that organizes society polycentrically and communally; where identity is spiritual and beings are born and then born again; where ancestors though temporarily without bodies, are accessible and efficacious members of the community; and where one of the primary methodologies (technologies) of access to time, to the communal self, to the spirit, to the ancestor is dance.

Space Carcasses engaged the dancing body in an assertion of an Africanist embodiment of "being" that extends, through the practice of dancing, beyond the body's physical limits. In exploring the body's relationship to its built environment, the body and mind worked together to extend the individual's sense of embodiment into the building within which we stood, as an exoskeleton, skin, or mask.

The project danced these buildings, animated them out of their entrenchments and into a next existence that extends from the live vitality of the dancing body.

It referred to the classical dancing of the West African masquerade: Egungun is a Yoruba masked, costumed figure, specifically for ancestor reverence, or the ancestors themselves as a collective force. The creative team was interested in how we, in our dance with the building, can control and move our (and the audience's) perception and experience of the built environment. The team was interested in the body's agency to assert a driving and definitive role over the existence, the meaning, and the import and impact of built environments.

The Sites

Savannah, Georgia

The vaults on Factors Row — site-specific movement research engaged in the corners of buildings, utilizing the three planes of a building's corner as a container within which to develop a movement repertoire. Architecture as experienced literally in buildings that contained the soft flesh of our bodies.

Cape Verde

The architecture of Cape Verde, and the ephemeral layer of Saharan dust traveling over the island on the eastern trade winds. An ancient wind stimulated our skin, our nostrils, our body-mind's capacity for sensing our position and connected us to its journey through time.

Abuja, Nigeria

Geographically disparate, yet historically interconnected: the contested Afro-Diasporic relationship between these sites was the ground on which Space Carcasses stood. Buildings separated by oceans, floating in the dust of thousands of years of the earth redistributing itself.

Technology

Using 3D visual and audio technologies, the team mapped and digitally reproduced the proposed sites to be superimposed during performance. Architecture as in the building and designing of our way of life — and perhaps out beyond that into thinking of the Earth itself, with its spacious garments (water, air, light and their movements) as walls wrapped and the ceilings vaulted above us.

Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry was used to reconstitute an exact 3D copy of reality through capturing successive photographs of the site. The series of photographs of the same subject from different angles was analyzed by a correlation algorithm, creating a "point cloud" that forms a 3D image. These 3D photographs were the raw material for a panoramic 360° installation in which a dancer — live or virtual — could inhabit.

Wave Field Synthesis Array

The team captured 3D audio of a sound-costume-masquerade (in reference to Egungun) worn by the dancer improvising within the sites. At the EMPAC residency, a Wave Field Synthesis Array — a 558-channel discrete loudspeaker array — was employed: a spatial audio rendering technique that placed virtual sound sources in real space. The audio data of the sound-costume was placed "physically" in space, perceived by the human auditory as the same as it would in a real sound field.

3D Video Mapping

The process was mirrored and extended by project collaborators using 3D video mapping, site-specific sound experiments, impulse recordings, and more. Geographically disparate sites were engaged in site-specific improvisations and then interfaced in technologically mediated live performance.

View in the Archive → 3D Models

Space One Video Projection

[PLACEHOLDER — client to provide language for this section.]

A Work That Accumulates

Space Carcasses was designed as an iterative, process-based work that is modular and scalable, accumulating toward its premiere. The process of creation involved the creative team traveling to the three sites — Savannah, GA; Cape Verde; and Northern Nigeria — to fully engage in the somatic experience of being in the spaces.

These residencies included a process of mapping and recording data from the spaces as well as developing movement scores, all of which were in relation with the people who frequented these spaces. Informal site-specific works-in-progress were developed at each site and produced in collaboration with local arts, historical, and cultural organizations to cultivate local audiences.

As the data — sound, video, and movement scores — collected from each site accumulated, the options to remix data exponentially grew, allowing more experimentation with the accumulated space carcasses.

01A live performance "white box," in which the digital carcasses were superimposed over the present room.
02Through virtual reality, in which the gestures, actions, and interactions of bodies and spaces could inhabit.
03A site-specific performance in which the remixed data was placed in-situ and in conversation with a new site.

Space Carcasses in performance · [venue, year]

View the work.

Enter the Archive Meet the Team