Air-conditioning is a process of controlling heat to improve the comfort of a space. “Like in the Middle Ages, air-conditioning sustains our cathedrals” (architect-urbanist Rem Koolhaas). Air-conditioning is the spine of generic cities. From this spatial context, Air-conditioning drives a dancer into a breathing journey. Sensitively, she lets herself be contaminated by the successive accumulation and shifting temperatures in the room and the materiality of Junkspace’s text. By incorporating symptoms of change and finding a way to continue to breath, a strange ritual appears. The body is transformed and hybrid creatures appear, escaping conditioning and opening new waves of circulation.

CREDITS
Choreography: Lyllie Rouvière
Performance: Jukek Kreutzer
Support: Ada Studio | Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin | Uferstudios-Team
Thanks to: Xenia Taniko. Laurent Chétouane (mentor)

VENUES
November 2018 Centre d’art La Fenêtre, Montpellier (FR)
January 2018 Nah Drahn 68, Ada Studio, Berlin (DE)
October 2017 Rush in 2, Uferstudios, Berlin (DE)

« Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing…the product of an encounter between an escalator and air-conditioning. Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire-shutter, hot-air curtain… It promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo)…Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble. Gravity has remained constant, resisted by the same arsenal since the beginning of time; but air-conditioning- invisible medium, therefore unnoticed-has truly revolutionized architecture. Air-conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates building, air-conditioning unites them. Air-conditioning has dictated mutant regimes of organization and coexistence that leave architecture behind. A single shopping center is now the work of generations of space planners, repairmen, and fixers, like in the Middle Ages; air-conditioning sustains our cathedrals. Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space; sooner or later all conditional space turns into Junkspace…Junkspace is the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness. Junkspace is a Bermuda Triangle of concepts, an abandoned petri dish: it cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction… Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends… »
Extract from Junkspace, Rem Koolhaas, 2002

Collage: Lyllie Rouvière