Astrid Sweeney & Weixin Chong — Ontogenesis Dreams

A being in its seemingly natural habitat embarks on an existential metamorphosis. Disoriented and disassembled, it finds itself falling, sensing, mimicking the movements of plants, machines or insects; a post- or trans-human organism trying to piece together its existence in an ambiguous body.

Ontogenesis Dreams is a collaborative hybrid of performance and installative environment choreographed and performed by Astrid Tetsche Sweeney with sculpture & scenography by Weixin Quek Chong. Inspired by the molting processes of insects, queer ecologies and the radical vision of post-apocalyptic adaptation in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, they explore the body’s impermanence through its relationship with an unruly organic material. Developed over five years of collaboration through international residencies in Singapore, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, this work envisions the struggle of transformation called for by crisis, depicting this process as not only difficult and tremulous, but poetic and regenerative.
instagram.com/ontogenesisdreams/

about

Weixin Quek Chong (she/they/他, b. 1988, Singapore) is an artist whose work is inspired by hybridity, metamorphosis and sensorial languages. They draw from communal behaviours, aesthetic and subcultural trends and movements as a way of peeling back layers of societal constructs and finding interconnections between beings, objects, histories and worlds. They have presented work, completed residencies and received awards in major cities across Asia, Europe and Latin-America – from Santiago (Chile) over Seoul (Korea) to London (UK), amongst others. Weixin lives and works in Madrid.
instagram.com/jadeite.bat/

Astrid Tetsche Sweeney (She/her, b. 1994 Copenhagen) is a Danish/Irish performer and choreographer interested in interrogating movement through stasis, stimulus and isolation of individual body parts. Her recent work questions and distorts the perspective we have on the femme body through investigating forms of motion that could be considered otherly or uncanny. She has worked on film, theatre, dance and other hybrid choreographic projects across the globe (with the Scottish Dance Theatre, in the short film Soft Rio, site-specific performance Weven, among others). Now based in Brussels, she freelances as a performer, outside eye and choreographer, having collaborated with artists like Iván Pérez, Tamsyn Russell, Luke Murphy, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and Damien Jalet.
instagram.com/astridtsweeney/

This performance is co-programmed with Bâtard, a Brussels-based performance festival presenting local and international emerging artists.
instagram.com/batardbrussels/
batard.be/