PNEUMA – Wärmezeitmaschine
Long durational performance (90 hours)
22.7.-3.8.2025 | Museum Schloss Moyland
as part of the exhibition Marina Abramović and MAI in dialogue with Joseph Beuys
curated by Serge le Borgne, Billy Zhao and Antje-Britt Mählmann
Photos by Philip Yakushin and Kirsten Becken | VIdeo: Philip Yakushin | Editing: Francesco Marzano | Acoustic designer: Tini Aliman | Sound engineering realisation and installation: Marco van Heys
Pneuma – Wärmezeitmaschine is an immersive, participatory performance that places breath at its centre – as a primal force of life, a collective bond, and a political symbol. The performer inhabits a resonating space in which his breath is acoustically amplified. Visitors are invited to become part of this sonic fabric through their own breathing. In this way, a living interplay of sounds, rhythms, resonances and bodies emerges – an acoustic sculpture, a breathing collective.
Pneuma means both “breath” and “soul” in Greek. The performance reflects on breath as a carrier of identity, a communicative potential, and a mirror of the macrocosm. Breath is as essential to our life as it is fragile – it can be hindered or suppressed, as demonstrated by pandemics or methods of violence and oppression.Inspired by Joseph Beuys’ participatory art concepts and his “energy plan” as well as by the breathing practices of the Marina Abramović Method, the project sees itself as an artistic-social experiment, a sensual and political invitation to attend to breath as a “primordial sound”, the most reduced form of togetherness, and the most elemental form of relating to the world.
Inspired by Joseph Beuys’ participatory art concepts and his “energy plan” as well as by the breathing practices of the Marina Abramović Method, the project sees itself as an artistic-social experiment, a sensual and political invitation to attend to breath as a “primordial sound”, the most reduced form of togetherness, and the most elemental form of relating to the world.
Links: MAI&Beuys | Schloss Moyland | Short clip | Longer video documentation | Sound collage
Marina Abramović Institute in dialogue with Joseph Beuys
13 July–26 October 2025 | Long durational performances the first 4 weeks.
Curated by: Serge le Borgne (France), Billy Zhao (USA) and Antje-Britt Mählmann (Germany)
Participating performance artists:
Isaac Chong Wai (Hong Kong/Germany), Cristiana Cott Negoescu (Romania/Germany), Maria Stamenković Herranz (Serbia/Spain/France), Sandra Johnston (Ireland), Rubiane Maia (Brazil/UK), Francesco Marzano (Italy/Germany), Virginia Mastrogiannaki (Greece), Michelle Samba (Friesland, Netherlands/Congo), Luisa Sancho-Escanero (Spain/Germany), Evan Macrae Williams (Canada/Germany), Yan Jun Chin (Malaysia/Germany), Martin Toloku (Ghana/Netherlands) and Eşref Yıldırım (Turkey)
More information HERE.
Habitat / Herrenhausen
Dance-Happening choreographed by Doris Uhlich.
Performed on May 24th & 25th 2025 in Hannover for KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen.
Fotos © KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Helge Krückeberg & Juliette Collas.
TV service (NDR) here.
Details and participants here.
Emergency Solos
by Christina Kubisch (1975)
reenacted and expanded by Francesco Marzano (2025)
In 1975 the artist Christina Kubisch conceived and performed for the first time the Emergency Solos, a series of pieces in which she reflected through her body and her instrument – the flute, which is used both musically and “sculpturally” – on topics such as personal and artistic liberation from the conventions, her role as a (female) artist in the (male-dominated) cultural enterprise, expectations and strict categorisations of the society – from which she proposed a kind of emergency exit, starting with these solos.
Exactly 50 years later I reenacted, with her permission, most of her pieces and put them side by side with new Emergency Solos conceived by me.
A lot has changed in the society and in the cultural life since then, but some battles and struggles are always actual and relevant.
The Emergency Solos are pieces about identity torn between personal vocation and social impositions, about limits in communication, about the abuse of power by institutions that still decide what is art and who is allowed to do it, about the paradox between the intimacy of the relationship with one’s instrument and the unavoidable public dimension of art.
They mix autobiographical elements and episodes (curiosity, depression, passion, imagination, self-doubt, addiction, failure, ambition, the love-hate relationship with my instrument, …), oscillate between slapstick and ancestral images, gentleness and disturbance, and challenge the limits of body, instrument and breath – understood in the sense of the Latin spiritus, both as breath and as soul. They are a quest for an authentical voice, for alternative paths and narrations, for sounds, images, connections, extremes.
List of the pieces
[CK] = Christina Kubisch, [FM] = Francesco Marzano
It’s so touchy [CK]; Week-End [CK]; Variations on a classical theme I [CK]; Variations on a classical theme II [CK]; Private piece [CK]; Break [CK]; Untitled (Mummy) [CK]; Play it like a real man [FM]; The Future [FM]; À bout de souffle [FM]; Piece against Aphasia [FM]; Water Music [FM]; Little Bang [FM]; Vor der Erstarrung [FM]; La flûte [FM]; Sabre dance [FM]; Spīritus ephēmerus [FM]; A man should always have an occupation of some kind [FM]; Gravity 9,81 [FM]; Firework [FM]; Ignis Flautus [FM]; Inside the sound [FM]; Lichtspiel [FM].
This version of the Emergency Solos was performed in cooperation with MAI (Marina Abramović Institute) and Kunsthaus Zürich at Theater Neumarkt in Zürich, 10.-12. January 2025, as a 3-day-long durational performance. The studio documentation was made at Theater Marabu in Bonn, 4. February 2025.
CREDITS: Philip Yakushin (Foto & Video); Francesco Marzano (Video Edit)
