On 6 April at 7pm Mårten Spångberg, multidisciplinary choreographer and writer, will be at Fabrica for a lecture open to the public titled What Is in an Image Is Not What an Image Is.
The lecture takes at its starting point two quotes by Jean Luc Godard, which both showed up on Instagram on the occasion of Godard’s 2022 passing: ”We should replace vague ideas with clear images” and “Not a just image, just an image”.
Both originating in 1967, they come across as strangely contradictory. Yet they were both used to praise the filmmaker. Perhaps because of a slightly awkward translation flaw, Godard’s tendency towards universalism, that it’s cool to quote Jean Luc Godard or for some other reason.
The however perspective is not to speak about Godard but instead use the quotes as a means to discuss relations between image, imagination, aesthetic production, ecology and climate change. Central to Mårten Spångberg’s multi-disciplinary practice is to locate and understand relations between, for example, information and experience, conceptual and concept, culture and art, language and imagination, performativity and the archaic, ancestrality and change.
Mårten Spångberg is a multidisciplinary choreographer and writer living and working in Berlin and Stockholm. His interest concerns dance and choreography in an expanded field, something he has approached through experimental practice in a multiplicity of formats and expressions.
He has been active on stage as a performer and creator since 1994, and since 1999 has created his own choreographies, from solos to larger scale works.
Under the label International Festival, Spångberg collaborated with the architect Tor Lindstrand and engaged in social and expanded choreography.
Spångberg has thorough experience in curating as well as teaching, both practice and theory. From 2008 to 2012 he directed the MA program My Choreography at the University of Dance in Stockholm. He has been engaged as professor at The National Academy of The Art, Oslo, and HEAD, Geneva.
He has been published extensively and his first book “Spangbergianism” was published in 2011.
His recent performances “La Substance, but in English”, “The Internet”, “Natten” and “Gerhard Richter, une pièce pour le théâtre” have gained extensive international recognition.
His work has further been exhibited extensively e.g. Tate Liverpool, Witte de With, Le Magasin, Hayward Gallery, Haus der Kunst, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, CAC Vilnius, Hordaland Kunstcenter, Giessener Neue Kunstverein.
His current work concerns ecology and post-anthropocene aesthetics.
Spångberg’s lecture is part of the “Archaism” residency program curated by Carlos Casas and it also includes a workshop experimenting with forms of accessing archaic states and relations.
