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“Noise songs for a ten year marriage anniversary”
After an unforgettable launch event during Amsterdam Art Week, The Live Art Series resumes on July 12th! For the second occurrence of the series Kitty Maria & Elise Ehry present “Noise songs for a ten year marriage anniversary” – an evening consisting of two parts, firstly with a work commemorating a full decade of artistic collaboration between Kitty Maria and Elise Ehry, and secondly continuing with a spotlight on Kitty Maria’s solo work. “Air Tonalities” by Kitty Maria & Elise Ehry is a continuation of the duo’s longterm project embodying the figure of unemployed air hostesses. For The Live Arts Series the two artists present an experimental music performance. “Notes on Performance” by Kitty Maria was originally produced in a sugar factory that explores a new playful relationship between machine and operator. Without the machines being present the artist calls upon them with the use of the (side) products of the machines, such as smoke, plastic foil, yarn and relationality to create a wedding-like scene.
Doors open at 20:30; performances 21:00; afterparty 22:30
The Live Art Series is supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst (AFK).
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Programme:
“Air Tonalities” by Kitty Maria & Elise Ehry
Elise Ehry and Kitty Maria work as unemployed air hostesses, wearing their self-made uniforms while being permanently off-duty. The first female flight attendant was employed in 1930 to both serve and appease passengers with a maternal and groomed presence. Within her role and appearance, she had to portray a gentle negotiating power to calm people down through a terrifying and unnatural new way of traveling. Since the beginning of their collaboration in 2014, Kitty and Elise have kept unfolding the figure of the hostess and the ways in which she can retire from duty. This withdrawal from “duty” signified a broader resistance towards the historical interweaving of gender and labour, and specifically the mystification of the female sexe for commercial purposes, stripping her of her own desires to be of service to others. “Air Tonalities” is a series within the duo’s air hostess practice that investigates air as an artistic medium to create form and sound. By layering the sounds of their handcrafted clay instruments, DIY electronic circuits and the service workers’ voice they produce uncanny jingles and noise songs.
“Notes on performance” by Kitty Maria
Notes on performance was originally produced in an old sugar factory turned museum in Zeeland (NL). In this peromance three performers have an intimate encounter with the out of duty machines and offices of the industrial museum. They use strings of thought from Object Oriented Ontology to find ways for a person to meet a machine without the specific desire to control it. It’s an emancipation of the relationship between machine and operator. The performers wear hand-knitted outfits, referring to the fashion trend on social media platforms such as instagram where small makers are selling their hand-knitted “amateur” outfits. Garments are often intentionally poorly made or ‘distressed’ appearing as if falling apart – a cutified contemporary punk movement in which stitches are intentionally dropped to break away from the polished world that industrialisation has brought us.
Kitty Maria
Kitty Maria’s (Ottersum, 1992) practice explores performance as an historic tradition in the arts, and performance as an industrial norm; the use of the body as a medium of expression and the use of the body for work. In her projects she regularly intervenes in companies or stores, to construct scene’s on the shop floor that interrupt the daily ideology of labor. Kitty Maria lives and works in Amsterdam. She obtained her MFA at the Sandberg Institute in the Dirty Art Department where she met Elise Ehry and started developing the unemployed air hostesses project.
Elise Ehry
Elise Ehry (France, 1991) is a Paris-based designer and casual performer. She is interested in the way clothing alters social relations between individuals and questions the performative potential that lies between the work uniform and the stage costume. Since 2014, she has been operating as an unemployed air hostess in close collaboration with Kitty Maria where they deconstruct notions of gender and invisible labor in the service industry. Elise Ehry obtained her MFA at the Sandberg Institute in the Dirty Art Department where she met Kitty Maria and started developing the unemployed air hostesses project.