Rosanna Graf

Renaissance Reflux - The Garden

Performance, with Paulina Nolte, 2023, 20 min., (audio + video)

Renaissance Reflux is a collaboration between Rosanna Graf and Paulina
Nolte that deals with the act of “Weirding”. In text-based, musical, and
dance performances, they examine cracks in the human self-image and
question the cyclical relationship between humans and nature.

The Garden
In the surrealistic singspiel Renaissance Reflux – The Garden, the artists
deal with the figure of the garden hermit. The artists live in the garden directly
adjacent to the Bochum Art Museum as Magdalene-like hairy hermits.
In their actions, they open up a spectrum between reality and hallucination
and celebrate the act of “Weirding” (turning to the strange) as a survival
strategy. Their anonymous isolation, observable from the large windows of
the exhibition space opposite, provokes a series of absurd actions and
reactions. How do we control nature (in and around us) and how does it
control us?

Performance, text, and music by Rosanna Graf & Paulina Nolte.
With quotes from Pamela Anderson and a sonnet written with OpenAI.

Renaissance Reflux //, performance, 2023, Les Gardiennes, curated by Lisa Klosterkötter and Alicia Reymond, Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2023, documentation photos (photos: Lisa Klosterkötter)

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Renaissance Reflux II

Performance, with Paulina Nolte, 2023, 20 min., audio + video

Renaissance Reflux is a performative collaboration between the artists Rosanna Graf and Paulina Nolte. In it two women find themselves undergoing states of radical transformation in which the act of “Weirding” becomes a survival strategy. They are popping up in different realities as different characters with contrasting sensibilities and confronted with strange outcomes.

In it's second iteration Renaissance Reflux – The Garden Graf and Nolte are recalling an unusual Renaissance profession: As female garden hermits they inhabit the garden of the Kunstmuseum Bochum eager to fulfill their roles as "thinking beings".
Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits (solitaries) encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment.
In a surrealist singspiel, Graf and Nolte's characters oscillate between Mary Magdalene like figures and posh little animals quoting Pamela Anderson and OpenAi.

Text and music by Rosanna Graf & Paulina Nolte
With quotations by Pamela Anderson and a sonnet by OpenAI

Renaissance Reflux //, performance, 2023, Les Gardiennes, curated by Lisa Klosterkötter and Alicia Reymond, Kunstmuseum Bochum, 2023, documentation photos (photos: Lisa Klosterkötter)

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