“WARM ARCHIVE”
Stacey Collee, Andrea Illés and Alice Tsiavos
22 Apr → 21 May 2023
WARM ARCHIVE is a duration performance by three artists in collaboration, Stacey Collee, Andrea Illés, and Alice Tsiavos.
WARM ARCHIVE emerges from an aspiration to uncover alternative methods for processing contested language. Conscious of the futility of responding to language of this kind, the artists explore digestion as an approach to consuming texts that are critical of their bodies.
They inhabit the West Space Window for a period of three weeks, a site that frames them within a place of public scrutiny and institutional surveillance. During this time, Stacey, Andrea and Alice consume and disarrange the words found in texts that seek to limit or erase transness, finding poetry and choreography in reformation and recontextualisation.
The forth and final week acts as a post-script period, with the artists materialising their research into a body of work in the Window.
WARM ARCHIVE is an iterative collaboration between artists Andrea Illés, Alice Tsiavos, and Stacey Collee. Connected through their experiences within institutional spaces, their collaboration translates found texts into physical performance using digestion as both ethos and methodology. Beginning in 2022, WARM ARCHIVE exists through myriad moments of discussion, analysis and connection, recently coalescing into a month-long performance installation in the West Space Window.
The West Space Window is supported by City of Yarra through their Annual Arts Grants Program.
Andrea Illés is a performance artist whose auto portraits explore the relational chasm between self and other. Merging dance, text, sound, and video, her enquiry emerges from the agony and euphoria she feels being perceived. Often working with states of overwhelm, Andrea is interested in the possibilities found in intense experience. Andrea was an artist in residence in the West Space Studio from February to August 2024.
Alice Tsiavos is a performance artist in Naarm/Melbourne.
