“The reflection (this dismembered body) seems to be the threshold of the visible world, if we surrender to the mirror-like arrangement that the Imago of our own body presents in hallucination and dream” (free after french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the “I” Function, lecture, 1949).
A poster of the imaginary entirety of the body in the mirror hangs over moi bed (2021) is a silent short film. The film explores the performativity of the passive in a situation in which the artist scans his own body as a carnal, distant, alien, raw entity, with the help of the REVERSED glass of a lens held manually over the camera's sensor. A tilted image, which on the one side shows the result of this technique (the film itself), on the other gives an idea into the performativity of the filming process itself (the tilted body, trying to keep the camera and himself still and focused whilst filming himself).
The film was shot on the ruins of a medieval monastery in southern Bulgaria. An ancient, wounded, inanimate landscape that, just like the bodies inhabiting it, constitute a vague, vulnerable, inanimate reflection of themselves.
FiGURES is a series of silent short films in which deep sensations within parts of my body are choreographically examined and visually exposed.
FiGURE_1 (2019) is the bellyshake; “Bauchgefühl” (gut feeling); what does your gut tell you?
Johannes Schropp (*1997) is a Performance Maker/Choreographer. In his interdisciplinary works, bodies meet in mostly installative, sculptural and durational formats. In addition to the blending of the fields of Dance/Performance, Music/Sound Art, and Film/Video, questions of identity, normativity, passitivity and form of being present are often negotiated. Likewise, there is a focus on exploring the potentials of time-based art in none-time-based framings.
Johannes is studying MA Choreography & Performance in Giessen, before BA in Stuttgart (Performance with Jennifer Walshe, Composition with Martin Schüttler). Furthermore, he has been creating Sound concepts for theatre, dance and performance productions since 2018.