Nonplace: Dance and Movement

Nonplace is a neologism created by Marc Auge in his Anthropology of Supermodernity, referring to anthropological spaces of transience where the human beings remain anonymous and do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places". Examples of non-places would be public spaces like motorways, hotel rooms, airports and museums.

As a curator of the exhibition, I am mostly interested in the blatantly different body depictions, where human embodies a different state of being. Works which are rendered through their author’s language. I seek for artists who are individuals fuelled by social protest and for whom the whole world is a nonplace, allowing them to portray  threatening surroundings.

My exhibition research the relationship between human body movement and nonplaces. One of the nonplaces is the gallery itself.  The perception of its space is strictly subjective: each of us in his or her own way can see the same place as a non-place, or as a crossroads of human relations. For instance, a gallery is not a non-place for a person who works there or visit every day. The concept of non-place is opposed, according to Augé, to the notion of "anthropological place". The place offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references.

Using nonplace as a venue for dance may seem paradoxical, but in identifying nonplace, we are trying to theorize the political effects of a site deployed to erase location – a place that works to render itself invisible. Nonplace substantiate dance’s mediation across analogue and digital platforms. Its very emptiness grounds dance practices and launches dancing bodies into new sites by erasing topological specificities and creates confrontation between the visible and the articulable. The dance in nonplace is a philosophy that tries to discover thru deconstruction.