Biennial Project

Re-collection, 2018–ongoing
Performative action

Commissioned by the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial

Performed by Macey Westall, Zachary Nicol, Jennifer Tchiakpe, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Courtney Mackedanz, Asha Benjelloun, and Sheli Ruffer

Alexandra Pirici’s practice fuses dance, sculpture, spoken word, music, and performance. Her projects explore site-specific histories, institutional hierarchies, the presence and limits of the body, and the function of gesture in art. Re-collection is an ongoing action in which performers embody and give new form to memories, sensations, existing or fictional objects (from artworks to nature), events, sounds, and gestures, producing a living environment that is both strange and familiar. Situated in the Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda of the Chicago Cultural Center, a memorial to Civil War veterans, it conjures references that are both internationally circulated and locally relevant, iconic and obscure, generally recognizable or personally significant. Space is created in relation to, and as a relation between, living structures and movement. Remembering but also un-fixing, destabilizing history and meaning, the work is a living, constantly shifting collection of mutating shapes and configurations, all up for reinterpretation, fleeting, and scaled to the human body.

Performances will take place at scheduled times.