“This is a ghost story,
Technology has conquered death,
but with endless future
comes endless past”
– Altered Carbon, Netflix
We shall not even know... is a hybrid fashion show, costume drama, carnival and play based on Tanz Macabre. With a desire to investigate theater forms based on costume, Fredrik Floen became interested in this genre, mainly the visual presentation; a spectacle in which the whole community is led from the church to the grave by a group of dancing skeletons. In its purest form, it is a literary, pictorial representation of a procession or dance of both living and dead figures, the living arranged in rank order, from pope and emperor to child, clerk and hermit, and the dead leading them to the grave.
Costumes are an extension of the imagination. I aim to visualize fantasies that both deepen and challenge the wild and violent energy and poetry in the world. Where text can open up and create spaces that it is not possible to create in reality, the costume can concretize the supernatural, the unrealistic and the madness on another concrete level.
A tower frames the performance. The Tower is one of the most powerful and enigmatic cards in the Tarot deck, embodying themes of upheaval, transformation and the power of destruction. The Tower represents the forces of change that can strike suddenly and without warning, disrupting our lives and leaving us reeling in its wake. This installation/performance/rehearsal/costume play is a material formulation of that constant tension between stability and unstability.
The performance was presented as the Norwegian contribution at the Prague Quadrennial in June 2023.
Fredrik Floen is a costume designer who presents his work in a range of different theatrical contexts. His artistic practice is circling around the theatrical, assortative, challenging, unfinished, fantasy and maximalism working with new ways of approaching identity, future, body(culture) and co-existence.
+ 4 November / Aftertalk with Fredrik Floen
Meet Fredrik Floen and members from the cast in a conversation right after the matinee performance at 2 PM.
