About
Lea Luka Tiziana Sikau
Lea Luka Sikau (she/her) is an Artist-Researcher, conducting her PhD on critical posthumanism, new music and rehearsal ethnography at the University of Cambridge. She teaches on artistic research processes at Humboldt University Berlin and Seoul National University. Sikau has been a Bavarian American Academy Fellow at Harvard University’s Mellon School for Performance and Theater Research and was awarded with the Bavarian Cultural Award for her research at MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology. She has worked with some of the most sought-after visionaries in the arts such as Romeo Castellucci, Marina Abramović and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll). As a media artist and mezzosoprano, Sikau was commissioned by Ars Electronica Festival, transmediale, Impakt, Ensemble Modern and Climate Week NYC.
Image Copyright: Patrick Münnich
Artist Statement
In the performing arts and everyday speech, trusting your guts is a prevalent theme, however it remains unclear how the gut actually sounds out decisions. Working with liminal noises, I explore the sounds of rehearsing to create an extended sonic reality within the ReSilence challenge which is called Full-Body Sound Experience.
the gut rehearses to tell you something plays with sonic (a)synchronicities and observes how embodied contact shapes new, more intimate relationships with our own body. Resonating with the topic of aural diversity, the performance installation examines a notion of silence that is always-already entangled with sound, even if it usually escapes the human ear. Trusting our guts means being in tune with our intuitions, learning to get closer to strange sensations in order to guide us along the way. the gut rehearses to tell you something sheds light on the vibrancy of the gut feeling in silently navigating today’s world. The project sounds out multi-organ communication that usually gets hushed (and thus invisibilized) and offers an immersive setting to approach these internal organs.
Stomach contractions are an underexplored modality that promises to offer new information about human affect (Vujic, A., Tong, S., Picard, R., & Maes, P., 2020). Playing with the curiosity around “gut feelings” and their sonic translations, the project rehearses new ways of trusting the ineffable. This project generates a shift in our sensibilities with regard to our most intimate relationships: our internal entanglements. The staging of these multi-organ anti-models counteracts the triumphant logic of rationality. Can we rehearse trusting our guts and navigate the world in queer ways?
Project : the gut rehearses to tell you something
How often does your gut rehearse to tell you something but is overheard? the gut rehearses to tell you something is a performance installation that intertwines sound art and philosophies of science with neurogastroenterology. Via sonic means, it explores intimate ways of multi-organ communication that queer the medicalized gut.
Lea Luka Sikau past works
