Developed on residency in Athens, Greece, Root is the first in a trilogy of performance works that explore the idea of extended cognition - a term used to describe the idea that thinking should be seen as a dynamic exchange between our minds and the stuff of the material world. The more-than-human environments we inhabit play an active role in how we think and act, defining the trajectory of our individual and collective evolution. The three performances use the human body as a drawing device to work with some of the fundamental geometries that exist below the surface of things
The performance opens with one minute of overwhelmingly loud sound sampled from public demonstrations in the city at the time the work was made. The block of sound ends abruptly and shifts to a digital composition based on an imagining of what the Aulos - a double reed wind instrument known only from its pictorial representation on archeological fragments - would sound like. The sound echoes the movements of the two performers as they explore the bilateral symmetry of their bodies through the drawings they make in the marble dust. Each drawing is erased with a level run across the surface of the dust before the next drawing is made. Root attempts to drop below the turbulent events unfolding in the social and political fabric of Greek society at the time of its conception, to focus instead on the geometry we all share