tender orbits (live)
2025
Hangar Space, London
Cooke Latham Gallery, London
Goldsmiths CCA, London
tender orbits (live) is part of an ongoing series of performances and installations exploring our lacking relationship to man-made space debris. In this live movement piece performers repetitively orbit objects that take their inspiration from fallen space junk around their bodies, whilst sitting or lying on modified, decommissioned sun loungers.
The space junk objects, the sun loungers and the custom-made costumes all share a semiotic muddiness, hovering between hard-to-place materiality and aesthetic, mixing the clinical and the futuristic to the sweaty, dirty and bodily. The hand-carved smooth but heavy space junk objects escape their material origin and the clean and non-descript costumes trap heat inside. Some of the sun loungers have been covered with memory foam (developed by NASA to protect bodies in space) encased in wipeable, white textile, whilst some are left exposed in their decaying state. These juxtapositions probe on the ambivalence of caring spaces and actions, whilst the labour-intensive, out-of-sync orbiting engages with objects relations through tenderness, awkwardness and the erotic. The movements are accompanied by a low tremble of an orbiting bass sound mixed from the take-off audio of the Discovery rocket. The duration and number of performers varies.
tender orbits (live)
Duration: variable (15 minutes or longer)
Concept, direction, objects and costumes: Minna Pöllänen
Performers: Elise Tyson, Sohaila Baluch, Daniel Durnin, Yumin Lee, Gabriel Bonet, Katrine Skovsgaard, Minna Pöllänen
Sound design: Luna Tebbs
Photographs: Chris Lee
Video documentation by Anju Kasturiraj and Emma Finn
The work is part of an ongoing PhD research at the Royal College of Art supported by Kone Foundation.
