Christian Guerematchi: In the Cultural Embrace, performance

Christian Guerematchi is a dance maker and researcher, born in Slovenia, who lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He participated in the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts with his project Blaq Tito Addressing the Parliament of Ghosts (2022).

Now, he has returned to Ljubljana and MGLC as an artist-in-residence of the From Biennale to Biennale project, with which we celebrate 70 years of the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and announce its 36th edition in 2025. During the research residency at MGLC Švicarija, Christian Guerematchi again focused on the usual topics of his art: black European identity and the narratives of the black body. He explored the feeling of duality and the connecting of different cultural and social environments. It was a special challenge for him to find a way to think about the moving body within the symbolically and culturally marked Švicarija – also as a space of transitions and adaptations to historical circumstances. His performance, which consists of a video (cooperation with Ana Čigon) and two live dance positions performed on Švicarija’s Open Day, changes the residency apartment into a temporary immersive experience of the “cultural embrace”, where the boundaries between body and space, moving and staticness, observers and the performer are traced again and again.  

We also invite you to read the artist’s essay In the Cultural Embrace.

Christian Guerematchi, Blaq Tito Addressing the Parliament of Ghosts (2022), 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, From the void came gifts of the cosmos, 2023/2024, installation view at MGLC Grad Tivoli. Photo: Urška Boljkovac. MGLC Archive.