Video Performance 2024

Ekici lays on a black stage and dozens of fruits and vegetables are strewn all around her. Some sit on her body, others lay idly beside her. She performs with them, singing, playing, and eating them. In Colour of Sound, Ekici envisions the body as an open field of ritualistic desire, discovering in fruits and vegetables a relationship of colour and sound that is at once satirical and dangerous, unusual and beautiful. Her essential practice is a form of visual-aural-gustatory gesamtkunstwerk—relating the collective interface of our human senses as one where colour, sound, and taste depend on and interact with each other. A variety of different fruits and vegetables populate the video, each accompanied with its own sound. The droning low vibrations of spring onions, the rapid ‘plopplopplop’ of blueberries, and the bigger, slower ‘plop plop plop’ of grapes. In giving voice to the things we eat, Ekici responds with an inherent human playfulness towards food: she asks us, ‘what would these fruits do, if they could act? What would these vegetables say, if they could sing?’ She augments this sense of satire by anthropomorphizing that which we rely on: the very things which give us the nutrition we rely on for life. Through song, a subsequent element of ritual is created. A fervent and numinous atmosphere accompanies her as she raises fruits in her hands, plays vegetables like instruments, and ultimately consumes them. The ritual worships these vegetables for their beauty and necessity, while also satirizing our everyday practices of cooking them. At one point, Ekici raises a yellow pepper on a knife to her mouth, and begins to fake stab herself. The feeling that an artificial material (the ‘knife’) has penetrated into the natural world (the ‘pepper’) becomes palpable—and this danger reflects the threat posed by artifice in our lives. This artifice becomes a powerful double-entendre—a tool we use everyday to cook, cut, and make food with (sustaining the very essence of life), is revealed in its own intrinsic danger: that its usefulness is also an existential risk, a sharp-edged peril. Ultimately, the audience is invited to experience food beyond the aesthetic. Yes, we taste the acidic tingle of the pineapple she bites, hear the music of her grapes, and feel the apples she smash together, but we also recognize the prerogative behind these vegetations—without food, there is no life. (Text: Jono Wang Chu)

Fruits, Vegetables, knife, white tape, Costume, Theaterspotlights, Microphone

10:40 min. HD MP4, 16:9, sound, colour

Camera and Editing: Branka Pavlovic Sound/Voice: Nezaket Ekici Sound/Voice Mastering: ;Mladjan Matavulj Assistants: Elmas Ekici, Andreas Dammertz Thanks to: Theaterhaus Berlin Mitte