Summer 2019
PROJECT // Horizon factory is an interdisciplinary research and creation project by emerging artists Nina Vroemen (video, sound, and performance art) and Erin Hill (dance, choreography and writing). Their collaborative work is founded in new artistic practices and will bring together vast mediums: video, installation, dance, performance, writing, sculpture, Google-Map photography, as well as studies on industrial architecture, weather systems, meteorological predictions and environmental pollution.
This first phase of Erin Hill and Nina Vroemen’s research and creation process will last one month, and will comprise: a 2 week in-situ research (field work) in three industrial communities surrounding the island of Montreal, a 2 week studio residency at Studio 303 in downtown Montréal, and a work-in-progress outcome performance.
The heart of our research is around clouds: polluting clouds from factory smoke stacks, exhaust clouds from fume pipes, atmospheric clouds on the horizon, electronic clouds where data is stored. Our curiosity is called by the unseizability of these clouds and the ephemeral narratives that form them. These narratives are historical, personal, troubling, environmental, futuristic, and potential warning signs.
How do we bring the invisible narratives that surround Montréal, the peripheries that form the island, the clouds that drift by, to the heart of the city?
Through the intersection of sound, video, dance, writing, pollution (both verbal and industrial) and magic, we will encounter the state of apparition in performance and in life.
Erin Hill and Nina Vroemen by Laurie Benett
BIOS // Erin Hill (Aylmer, Québec, 1989) works as a choreographer, performer and writer, collaborating with entities such as radio waves, magic and the sun. She holds a BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University, and in 2018 received a Masters from DAS Theatre (NL, formerly DasArts). Her work has been presented in theatres and festivals across Canada, in New York, Amsterdam, Austria, Germany and Lebanon. Hill’s work gathers a multiplicity of mediums under the name of dance, attempting, via embodiment, to arouse polyphony of the senses and a noticing of this event. Through long duration practises, she works with her body as a site of experimentation; to notice habits of perception and to question how these habits are linked, historically and politically, to privilege and orientation. Tangled up in phenomenology, Hill creates spaces for tuning-in to somatic states, to disrupt what is taken for granted and to dance as a practice of redirecting dominant forces. Alongside her own works, Hill collaborates with theatre director Jana Vetten under the name “Local Business” since 2015, creating scores for site-specific improvised storytelling. As well, she works with the long-standing puppetry collective Café Concret, and is editor-in-chief of their upcoming publication “Moving Parts: Articulated Objects and Bodies in Performance”.
nina vroemen is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance and multimedia.
she seeks projects that quicken the heart.
she writes, creates and directs a collection of collaborative and solo projects.
working primarily with video, dance and sonic experimentation, she aims to engage audiences in realizing voiceless narratives, unmarked history and the silhouettes of memory.
last autumn she performed, love songs to failure, in the feminist digital arts festival, HTMlles, 2018 with Alejandro Sajgalik. For the performance, recorded memories were remixed with projections, movement, and live musical improvisation.The work aimed to create love songs that celebrate friendship as a radical alliance. In doing so the work was challenging normative hierarchies of relations, examining settler sexuality and non-human relations.
this year her dance videos: “C R U S H” and “Apparitions and Improvisations: 1.1 Dollar Cinema” were screened at Somethings Shared, Neighbourhood Film Festival, and the Dawson City Short Film Festival.
she recently participated in the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture’s Artist Residency and is currently working on an experimental short film that looks at relationships between humans, animals and land in the North through the lines and holes we create. The project engages with the intersections of queer theory and ecological criticism, documentary and fantasy, presenting new perspectives to a conversation that has been ongoing for decades concerning the delicate ecosystem of the Canadian North.
nina is also the creator of the freak-folk project bluhour.