Jani Ruscica

Felt the Moonlight on My Feet

Background evening

15/07/2021

19:30

On July 15th, Jani Ruscica presented the performance Felt the Moonlight on My Feet and spoke speak about their work via a live stream.

In Felt the Moonlight on My Feet, Suzanna Pezo, a tap dancer interprets an array of prefixes, selected by Ruscica, which have been translated into Morse Code. Prefixes are like parasites, they latch on to words and alter their meaning. Take prefixes like re-, dis-, un-, which change the meaning of particular verbs. Or they can delineate ranking, such as sub-, vice-, ultra, or just emphasize change itself, post-, alter-, trans-, contra, dys-. Prefixes appear in almost all languages, and their brevity lends itself perfectly for staccato dance steps.

Felt the Moonlight on My Feet is a pas-de-deux of two languages, dance and morse. This also makes the work a collaboration between the artist and the dancer and becomes an intersection where language, place, culture, sculpture, sound, theatre and performance meet. Questions about translation and cultural representation arise. All of these are recurring themes in Ruscica’s artistic practice.

Ruscica’s Background Evening was part of the program around Tarwe en Walnoot, the solo exhibition in which the artist presented new work at 1646.

Info

About Jani Ruscica: Ruscica (b. 1978) (they/them) was born in Savonlinna, Finland and raised in Italy; they currently live in Helsinki. Ruscica has realized a wide range of commissions, including those for Camden Art Centre and Animate Projects in London, and MoMA PS1, Creative Time, and MTV global in New York. Their work was included in Everything was Forever Until It Was No More, 1st Riga Biennial (2018); and presented at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2016); and the Kunsthalle Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art (2013).

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