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GUT, a durational performance by the performance maker and sociologist Diane Mahín, is a singular experiment in staging amazement: how do humans behave when their bodies are turned inside out? The artist has addressed this question in her work for years, presenting various performative situations that give rise to an unknown soundscape generated by the performer's body. During this experience, spectators come face to face with a man whose intestinal sounds are amplified. The gut-human thoughts, actions, communications, movements and feelings are all determined by these visceral noises. A game of subtle variations is triggered, gurgling, muttering, minimal liquid landslides that redirect the astonished gaze of the performer, Manuel Groothuysen, into an internal dimension that is externalized as a sound fact and shared with others. This performative world draws attention to the thin boundary between life and death, conscious reasoning and the subconscious gut, resulting in a visceral and absurd experience. “I'm interested in dealing with the material reality of the body. We are made of matter and bacteria that fuel a continuous cycle of life and death: we organisms are part of the ecosystem.”
GUT
concept, direction, design Diane Mahín
performance Manuel Groothuysen
artistic advice Fabián Santarciel de la Quintana, Asya Deinekina, Erik van de Wijdeven, Gerben Vaillant
dramaturgical advice Elowise Vandenbroecke
assistance Liz Abels
co-producers instrument inventors initiative x Rewire, Come Together Festival
Special thanks to Performance Technology Lab, Over het IJ Festival, Erik van der Paardt, Bart van den Eynde, Sanne van Rijn, Bianca van der Schoot, Selm Merel Wenselaers
Diane Mahín is a Dutch-Iranian performance maker and sociologist. She makes performative worlds in which image and sound are the driving forces. Working with sound reflects her desire to be faced with highly subjective, confrontational, and immersive forms of reality. Mahín scrutinises the human body as a material object in order to dissect social constructions, as she wishes to grasp their absurdity and humour. Death and nothingness form the underlying motives of her work. After her studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, London and Maastricht Institute of Performative Arts, Maastricht, she is currently exploring operatic principles within her practice at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.
www.dianemahin.com
Hole is a format that Xing has been experimenting with since 2022, occupying and activating non-institutional places as a temporary redefinition of a public space.
Partners: Regione Emilia-Romagna, Comune di Bologna, Sonic Belligeranza, Megadue. Media partners: Edizioni Zero, ATPdiary, NEU Radio.
