de:manifestation is an ongoing artistic research project unfolding across performance, scenography, sound, installation, and moving image.
It investigates how identity, perception, and social inscription can be destabilized through spatial dramaturgy and embodied presence.
Rather than treating scenography as a supporting frame, the project approaches it as an active narrative force: something that structures experience, guides attention, and produces meaning through space, sound, light, body, and imagination.
At its core is a simple story:
A woman, exhausted by the pressure to become someone and to manifest herself within social and existential expectations, seeks a way out. She encounters a myth about a forest entity, a being said to offer absolute relief. Those who find it experience a moment of complete presence, including love, calm, and connection. After this encounter, they fall asleep in its embrace and are consumed, a final transformation that dissolves pain, memory, and identity.
conceptual frame
de:manifestation examines what happens when fixed roles begin to dissolve. The project starts from the tension between manifestation as social formation and de:manifestation as an undoing of imposed identity. This does not lead toward a stable essence or a resolved self. Instead, the work moves through zones of instability, transformation, exposure, and self confrontation.
Across its iterations, the project returns to the figure of the threshold: between human and beast, exterior and interior, landscape and institution, witness and participant, image and presence. These thresholds are not treated as metaphors alone, but as dramaturgical conditions to be built and tested through artistic form.
research questions
- How can scenography function as a narrative and curatorial structure rather than a background element
- How can sound, light, body, and spatial arrangement generate dramaturgy without relying on conventional plot delivery
- How can audience imagination become an active scenographic field
- How can performative presence be sustained when a work shifts between live performance, installation, and moving image
- How can different artistic roles remain porous within collaboration while preserving a clear conceptual direction
