Falling Out of the Human Horizon

Lydia McGlinchey (°1998, Sydney, Australia) is a Brussels-based artist of Peruvian-Irish heritage working with performance and textiles across theatre and visual arts. Her notable works include MadDoG (2024, Kaaitheater) and FERAL (2023, VIERNULVIER, Kaaitheater, Kunstencentrum BUDA). She has collaborated with artists like Oscar Murillo (The Flooded Garden, Tate Modern) and is a founding member of APOLEMIA, a Brussels-based event exploring performance in nightlife. Lydia studied at P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels), earning an MA in Performance and a BA in Dance.

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"a conscious falling out of the human horizon" - Oleg Kulik

I will present a performance inspired by the iconic work ‘Armadillo for Your Show’ made and performed by Oleg Kulik in 1996.

In ‘Armadillo for Your Show’ Kulik pursued his interest in the capacity of performance to strip the body of its ‘humanness’ by enacting forms at odds with humanness itself such as the animal or the inanimate. In ‘Armadillo for Your Show’ he becomes a disco ball, transforming his body into a light-filled object available for public observation.

In this work I would like to follow his desire for objectification transforming my skin into a reflective surface, becoming a disco ball, a light show, an ornament. I would like to explore what the potential of this gesture could be on a choreographic level, working with suspension and rotation of the body. Equally, I want to revisit the gesture of ‘becoming a disco ball’ to explore the meaning it could take on today.

In ‘Ornament’ I will enact the desire to become a generic surface stripped of context and I will seek the extraordinary through the body's objectification (a conscious falling out of the human horizon). In revisiting this gesture I would like to highlight the predicament of desire and motivation in our times: One might willingly make one’s body available for and seek out objectification and, at once, be alienated by doing so.

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