Hot House 2020

In October 2020, IN SITU organized an online Hot House, the first of its kind : designed in a pandemic context, therefore, it has happened online on Zoom. This Hot House gathered the IN SITU ACT members together with 15 European artists.

Scroll down to discover their projects.

Kyoko Scholiers (BE) | Zone X

The end of 2019 marked the beginning of a new era. How will people in a couple of decades from now be looking at this specific era, marked as it is by an avalanche of political, social, pandemic, ecological crises... What will future historians claim to be the causes of events that have not occurred yet? In the research for Zone X I’ll have a microscopic look at ourselves as the strange creatures we will be in the eyes of our descendants.

SUPERHALLO (NL) | HUM-Radio

In the times of Covid pandemic and lockdown, Superhallo seek different ways to interact with audiences and research the importance of expression. Music is a strong tool to use as a form of communication and to bring people closer together. One of the best ways we can express ourselves is through singing, however singing together in public space is not possible at this present time, so what about singing with our mouths closed? HUM-Radio is a project where each person is asked to think of a song and to which person they would like to dedicate this song and then to hum the song. When you are humming a song it’s an easy way to express yourself, you just have to think of the melody and there you go.


Lone Twin (UK) | The Two Fifty

The Two Fifty is a unique public participatory project to mark and celebrate 250 years of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in 2022.The Two Fifty will bring together 250 participants from across Norfolk and Norwich to become members of a very special volunteer organisation – a Guild dedicated to the disposition of its members: a good and kind person who is willing to help out. As part of its activities the Guild will celebrate and undertake acts of kindness, something that has become even more pertinent in current times. The Guild is 250 people ready and willing to help across the region; their activities forming part of the cultural life of the region. The public acts they undertake are designed as performances and so the Guild’s work serves as a meeting point between art, ceremony and ritual, along with the pragmatic activity of volunteering.

Emke Idema (NL) | Space of Embrace

The project Space of Embrace deals with intimacy and touch. Emke started working on it when the corona crisis kicked in. The ‘Hug package’ is gift that someone can give to a friend, family member, collegue who could use a hug. If you give it to someone, the receiver gets an email every morning at seven am, nine days long. These emails contain short (audio) stories (4-6 minutes) about touch and embrace to read or to listen to. Every embrace is different and tells a lot about a relation. How careful, close, natural, awkward, how long and how intense a cuddle is, is never the same, there is a world to be found in a hug.Sébastien Vial & Arnaud Boulogne (FR) |  QUE SAIS-JE ?Sébastien Vial ans Arnaud Boulogne dig into a worldwide wave of tutorials to understand the limits and the reasons to become A.U.T.O.N.O.M.O.U.S. QUE SAIS-JE ?  is a theatrical show talks about the pleasure of learning, and especially learning how to do anything. « How to » is the keyword. How to use? How to appropriate? How to transform? How to keep or how to reject the objects, the distance, the way we are living together. In fact, the starting point of this work is a documentary approach: all of the dialogues are issued from tutorial videos. Using the dramaturgical tool of a voice-over, the performance is transporting the public into a close future tale, taking place in 2042, with two characters : Octave and Claude. Together they decided to collect know-hows before they totally disappear. In the manner of Bouvard et Pécuchet (Flaubert’s characters) this process creates a kind of funny walk through the great and terrible knowledges of our time.Dávid Somló (HU) | In The HorizonIn The Horizon is a large scale site-specific piece that combines elements of landart, sound installation, performance and happening and which makes the desert or plain its protagonist. The half day event that is spectacular in its spatial and sonic effect while using minimalist theatrical forms offers audience members the experience of ’going out to the desert’. This site with its large vista and metaphoric connotations is able to invoke the space of spiritual experiences out of society, the atmosphere and stories of the hungarian outlaws and to offer contrast to the loss of perspective during the current pandemic.Flóra Sarlós from Ziggurat Project (HU)  | UnpluggedThe movement language of the site-specific piece Unplugged combines contemporary dance and theatre with real indoor climbing technique. The pre-study of the project, AWE is a site-specific indoor performance made for a climbing gym. The artists are looking for that certain state of awe, which is both frightening and uplifting, and in which we simultaneously feel pleasantly insignificant, yet connected to the whole universe.

Nana Francisca Schottländer (DK)  | Performative Landscapes

Inseparable Together - part of the Landscape, Bodyscape, Relationscape series- is a cross-disciplinary art project exploring the co-creational potential of encounters between humans and landscapes. Through performance, video, sound recordings, musical compositions and based on in-situ research in both cultural and natural phenomena of a given place, a unique portrait is formed in close and equal exchange between human(s) and nature. This results in landscape performances, video installations, live concerts and workshops in local communities.

Francesca Grilli (IT) | Spark 2021

Spark 2021 is a performance that creates a space where the usual power relationships between the child and the adult are inverted. The children become oracles, bearers of mystical knowledge, wielders of magical powers. They know your future. You enter the space and witness a community of oracles – a group of local children who have studied palmistry and the art of divination. Their faces are hidden behind caps but you can hear their voices. The outcome will put children and adults together in a dimension of interpretation of the body: the future, the past, the present through palmistry on a stage. Grilli cares to underline the sense of responsibility and view that only children have, situating them in a dimension of global vision of the world. However, the children will be free from any responsibility related to questions from the audience that will be invited to stay in silence: the children will wear a cap, through which they are able to see the hands of the adults, but the adult won’t see the face of the child. The action contains a profound sense of education, of the idea of the performance as a magical and necessary act.

Alex Deutinger & Alexander Gottfarb (AT) |  While no one is watching

What effects does an increasingly militarized police presence in public space have on the subjective feeling of security among citizens? In their performative-installation work WHILE NO ONE IS WATCHING, Alex Deutinger & Alexander Gottfarb raise questions about security, vulnerability and the protection of basic rights in public space. The performance consists of two fully geared riot policemen constructing a tower sculpture on a public square, in which they live for four days and perform daily routines of surveillance, as well as patrols within a larger defined inner city perimeter, with a variety of spontaneous interventions and direct interactions with passersby.

Pavel Truhlar (CZ) | Magic Prague

Magic Prague is an original marionnette theater performance. This performance is a combination of actors (mime and puppeteer) enhanced with video-mapping plus a traditional puppet theater decoration. The story takes place in Prague during Rudolph´s time and it is composed of Golem legend and other sub-stories of individual characters (set in an old time) that bind to sites of old Prague and thus express the magical atmosphere and genius loci of Prague streets and corners. Alluring wordless puppet show where background music is full of emotions and expresses individual marionette characters, this way the performance is suitable for young and old, for puppeteers or puppet lovers, for children and for their parents, for all those who want to discover the unique magic world of puppets.

Maëva Longvert - Le Polymorphe (FR) |  Nyctalope

NYCTALOPE  is an invitation to a large group of women to participate in a visual installation in movement. NYCTALOPE  is about our relationship to public space at night. Our avoidance strategies, our bypasses, our trajectories. At night our apprehension is different. Between dream and nightmare, NYCTALOPE appears in particular typological places, like pedestrian crossing, bus stop, in the light under a lamppost, in a narrow street, along a wall edge.These places are transformed, women are invited to reclaim them, to regenerate them.

Dukagjin Podrimaj (XK) | X-terr

X-TERR is about an artistic ability to transform a specific part of a territory within a “normal” territory to be experienced through a drive. Audience is invited to experience a drive through an audio-visual and installation outside the car as well as inside through the car’s audio system. This project questions the borders of our own individual safe environment. During the lockdown when the feelings of emptiness and loneliness became stronger and prevailing our everyday lifes, we started to investigate artistically the loneliness in our cars too. The safe and protected space of our cars becomes our solitude in wheels. What is the interconnection with others that we see through our windscreen. Our connection through FM radio waves becomes our gravity conjuction to traverse the city in the togetherness.

Matteo Lanfranchi from Effetto Larsen (IT) | Pop-up civilisation

Pop-up Civilisation is a project about decision-making processes within communities: a game, where participants are invited to become an original community and discuss the basic principles of any human society. This participatory art project explores how communities come together and fracture. Power, resources, justice, relationships: the cornerstones of our world, to be closely reviewed. In 2020, as a response to the current health crisis, Effetto Larsen has developped a new online format to make people aware of their role in desiring and wanting a different society. A new online version is currently being tested and will exist along - together and/or separately - to the real life project, to continue the research about the sense of community.

Claire de Wangen (NO) | The Osperheim Complex

The need for a hide out in the trees seems more urgent and comforting than ever. Claire de Wangen believes that we all have use for a secret, or not so secret, hide-out among branches–to breath and live, even for just a little moment alongside a tree. Even if this tree happens to be standing in the middle of a bustling city, being a daily witness to all the ongoings of its people, dogs, machines, insects and buildings. The Osperheim Complex wishes to propose a meeting in such a hide out. The meeting could be in the form of a performance or perhaps a more open-ended engagement. The project will investigate questions of hiding, of time and change, and of secrets. At this point the process is open to several artistic approaches. In the context of IN SITU collaborations, Claire would like to keep the framework open to a local discovery process, with the prospect of adaptation to a chosen terrain and tree(s). This would require local research, but it would certainly enrich both the process and the results. This approach would also enable a more dynamic overall storytelling if multiple places/contexts/trees/ecologies are connected through the project.