Presentation

Everyone has practices — be they intimate or collective, spiritual or physical, original or dull; invented practices, learned practices; pleasant, fastidious practices, social practices, invisible practices. Gradually, habits establish themselves as rituals — doing the washing up, sewing, praying, going shopping, boxing, shaving, rendering, posting videos, masturbating, photographing cans on the street, listening to reggae, wandering around in construction sites...
Dance is a situated practice that permits the combining of multiple bodies. It assumes routine activities that lead to a familiarization with materials. It articulates different manners of moving in the world, of inventing deviations, shortcuts, or detours. In societies marked by mutation—globalization, immigration, neoliberalism, climate change—where all has become exploitable—work force, appearance, origins, sex—dance is likewise undergoing transformation. Taken in the movement of her own shifting orientations, Lenio Kaklea wanted to reflect more broadly on these phenomena by making the portrait of a city, Aubervilliers, through the practices of its inhabitants.
Aubervilliers is a French community of 77.452 inhabitants in the Seine Saint-Denis. In the frame of her yearlong residency (2017-2018) at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an interdisciplinary art institution in the city, she conducted an eight-month survey throughout the municipality, collecting three hundred practices that have been edited into portraits. They are assembled in a book, Encyclopedia of Practices,Portraits of Aubervilliers. Through these pages one navigates a landscape of gestures and habits—invisible, social, or intimate—that constitute a city.
In the solo performance Encyclopedia of Practices,Chosen Portraits, Lenio Kaklea adopted an intimate rapport with the bodies that she encountered. She embodied their gestures; She contemplated the desires and the emptiness that animates them, that links the practices between them. She explored the space where the individual is constructed, where one’s own emancipation and self-exploitation occur. Finally, in the video installation Portrait#7: Maryse Emel, she exposed a day of studio work with Maryse Emel, philosopher and inhabitant of the city.
The richness and complexity of her work in Aubervilliers, led Lenio Kaklea to continue her survey and expand Encyclopedie Pratique to different European cities. She’s currently conducting interviews with residents and travelers in six different European cities from four European countries: Guissény, Poitiers (France), Nyon (Switzerland), Essen (Germany) and Athens (Greece).

Lenio Kaklea is a performer and choreographer. Together with Lou Forster she founded abd, a platform that develops choreographic and curatorial projects that explore the intersections of dance, research and critical theory. She is based in Paris, France.
Her work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, ImpulsTanz, the Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Brest's Quartz-Scène National, Latitudes Contemporaines and the Menagerie de Verre, DansFabrik, Quartz-Scène Nationale in Brest. In 2017, she presented work in the public programs of documenta 14 curated by Paul.B Preciado.

For further information please contact Iris Asimakopoulou (Iris.Asimakopoulou@athen.goethe.org) or Helena Papadopoulos (wave@radioathenes.org)

With the support of
The British Council