Zodiak Laboratory is Zodiak’s residency concept. Choreographer Karoliina Loimaala, together with her working group, will work during the residency with their new work Oilscapes.

Oilscapes

What would a world covered in oil be like? A world you could bathe in, a world that is essentially slippery, slimy, wet? What would an oilject be like – a subject that is radically constructed from oil, or smitten by it – a hybrid of human and oil? 

“During our period at the Zodiak Laboratory residency we will work on an imaginary situation (is it though?) where our world is inundated with oil. What kind of corporeal states, beings, emotions, does a human body undergo while giving into the affective sensorial effects of oil?

Recently my head has been filled with oil, oil news, wars, petropolitics, commerce, ordinariness, mysticism, potential of power, endless corruption, climate effects and big shots. How are we, or how can we be corporeally, emotionally attached to the dark, running, thick, explosive substance that has taken billions of years to evolve? That we then blast into thin air. 

Our work will be guided by the materialities of oil. We will be searching for an attunement to a world of oil and its corporeal existences, where concrete actions bump into meditative practices of tuning that gently open our fascia tissues. We will ask poetic and direct questions. We will work with transformations, tensions that are stored in our muscle tonus, and the opposite forces of liquid and solid. 

We will ponder ideas such as  “perhaps theatre will one day become the only possible space for experiencing nature” by choreographer Mette Ingvartsen and “the environment enters into the nature of each thing” by philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead. These ideas will shimmer over our entire working process. Can the state of performance function as a dystopia, as well as a utopia of a world of oil, as an ode to the end?”