Fluid Spaces

“An embryo still harbors within itself the potential for radical change.” performance text, Nasjonalt Medisinsk Museum curator Phil Loring

To embody embryogenesis is to invite a different materiality of movement, cells, tissues, membranes, and flow.

Movement arises not from intention or narrative, but through differentiation, accumulation, and drift. Attention becomes internal and precise, as if listening from within matter itself. Form emerges gradually: from formlessness to pattern, from fluid potential to temporary structure. These are movements before gesture or orientation. Time stretches, condenses, and loops.

The performance unfolds through thresholding states and transitional shifts, where one organization gives way to another. These are felt as changes in density, rhythm, and relation.

Four weeks after fertilization, embryos reach their phylotypic stage, resembling those of other species. What might it feel like to sense a multitude of possible becomings? This practice opens a psychophysical dramaturgy of time, scale, and relation. Perception shifts subtly; what occurs on stage resonates somatically for the audience, reshaping how time, form, and becoming are experienced. This fluid vibratory work invites us to feel into our own totipotency, past, present, and future.

El Aleph Festival, Palace of the School of Medicine, Mexico City, May 13, 2026

This site version unfolded as a series of scores situated among embryological specimens, creating a powerful dialogue between contemporary performance, scientific knowledge, and embodied experience. The setting itself was deeply resonant. The Palace of the School of Medicine, a magnificent Baroque building, was originally constructed between 1732 and 1736 as the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition before later becoming the National School of Medicine. Bringing a work centered on feminist perspectives and female bodies into a space marked by histories of authority, surveillance, and scientific inquiry generated a compelling tension.

El Aleph Festival, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Dance Theater, Mexico City, May 16 and 17 2026

We premiered a new 85 minute theatre version. This opportunity was organized by Gloria Contreras Chair in collaboration with the Norwegian Embassy in Mexico.

An earlier version of  work premiered as “a collection of fluid spaces“ at the Teknisk Museum in Oslo in 2022. You can learn more about Fluid Spaces here.