Ilya Noé
Artist statement:
Ilya Noé walks. Often relentlessly since she realized that walking is how she can best think/make.
Her need for slowing things down and sharing her processes is the main reason she now calls herself a visual/performance artist-researcher.
Ilya is also a verbal rambler, (over)eager collaborator, dissertation sufferer, and a fan of fungi, trees, deer, trees, foxes, interspecies entanglements, mutualistic processes,
shared authorship, slow research, messy theory, intellectual promiscuity, epistemological uncertainty, open-ended storytellings, ellipses…
Born and mostly assembled in Mexico City, she moved to New York to study art when she was still a teenager.
She has since expanded her modes of production and zones of propagation by popping up on all sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific to trace lines and build spaces by hand,
on foot, and in co-creation with both humans and non-humans alike.
Most recently, she presented her work at the 12th Biennale of Shanghai. She now lives, loves, and convolves in and around Berlin.
Ilya Noé website
statement / about the work
About the work:
Ilya Noé uses walking as a tool to both come from a to b, but additionally she challenges the mode of walking itself. She has in previous works worn hooves in the "Deerwalk" (2007).
She has walked alone from Berlin to Poland, she has co-created walks and mapped various cities with measures and footings.
In "Deascent" she is combining the mechanisms of the escalator with that of the body's ability to walk and move. Noé is challenging the drive of the escalator and moves both with and against the use of it.
By inviting others to re-perform this piece, she uses her own term to "surrogate perform" for this purpose, which means that the performer of the score deliveres the performance intead of her.
This is a process that can end in co-authorship due to the situations and choices that needs to be made in this process of re-performing. Noé has facilitated manifold of these erogate / surrogate situations,
leading to interesting processes of performance exchange.
Interview about the erogate / surrogate concept with Ilya Noé, Month of Performance Art Berlin by Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen (2013)