Index Foundation

Mending Engine, 2022

Performance by Alice Peragine
Duration approximately 20 minutes

„I WANT TO BE YOUR INBETWEENNESS
YOUR RAW CRACK
BEARING WITNESS TO PAVEMENTS
MELTING TO MOLASSES
I INHALE YOUR EXHAUST“

Alice Peragine will share an excerpt from their new performance series Mending Engine, 2022.
In this newly developed piece, they bake pancakes from asphalt (ger. Reparaturasphalt-Bitumen) used during road works and provisional road surface repairs.

During the performance they pour a sticky, thick sirup over a landscape of mended car parts, dried asphalt pancakes and their cracked surfaces. By filling the broken cracks of the pancakes with the sticky liquid, the pancakes are being prepared to be served to the attendants of the performance as a collectively shared ritual. The process of covering and mending is accompanied by a synthesized voice imitating the sounds of cars with combustion engines driving by in the distance. Simultaneously steam is blowing out of a fog machine and through the asphalt landscape, inviting associations towards transcendent modes of speech and healing rituals as provided by an oracle.

Alice Peragine, is a Hamburg-Copenhagen-based artist of Italian-American decent and the founder of Studio Peragine, Hamburg. They studied Fine Arts and Art History at the University of Greifswald (2006 – 2010) and Time-Based Media at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg (2010 – 2016) with foreign exchange semesters at Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem (2017) and San Francisco Art Institute (2013). In performances, installations, and assemblages, Peragine examines the ways in which protective technology sustains power structures and mechanisms of control, but can also open up freedoms and help safeguard individual and social self-determination. By allowing fragility and brokenness to be at the core of Alice Peragine’s artistic research, they are especially interested in the aesthetics of protection, focusing on materials used in the mobility and security industry. In their practice of repairing and mending they focus on provisional solutions and improvisation in order to tackle prevalent narratives of interdependence and strongness. Shows (selected): Kunstverein Hildesheim (solo 2021), Haus der Kunst (performance 2021) Lothringer 13 Halle, München (solo 2021); Studioraum 45cbm, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (solo 2020); feldfünf e.V. Berlin (2020); Kunstverein Dresden (solo 2019); Et al, San Francisco (2018); Neues Museum, St. Petersburg (2017). Peragine was a participant in the research project “Dear Humans” at Technical University Dresden (2017- 2019) and was a fellow at Villa Romana in 2020.