The Restitution of Complexity is a new performance by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll & Nikolaus Gansterer of live drawing, storytelling and sound that explores the body as archive. Improvising a state of constantly becoming something else, in collaboration, Carroll and Gansterer show the unconscious archives of Austria’s Stockholm Syndrome about its brief colony in Mexico, which ended with the assassination of Maximillian. A live video feed turns the sculptural accumulations that trace a delirious ficto-criticism into two dimensional projections. Made especially for the Austrian Cultural Forum, there are cameo appearances by Freud in Mexico, dreaming the demise of the empire. The Restitution of Complexity is based on a book about the return of the many complex agents who make up history, a history of humans’ relationships to objects and their restitution after conquest.
The Restitution of Complexity, 2017
10 parts, 40 mins
Pen & ink, diagrams, paper, charcoal, paint, various objects, Mictlāntēcutli, leg rattles, flashlight, feather, sound, photographs, glass box, Quetzalcoatl, archives and the unconscious.
