NECROPOLIS - Arkadi Zaides

Arkadi Zaides and his team are building an archive of bodies that were admitted to Europe only as bodies. Their starting point is the death list of migrants attempting to reach this continent and start a new life. This in order to conceive a virtual depository to document the remains of the many whose deaths are to this day unacknowledged. At the bottom of the sea, on the shores, and inland, a mass of decomposed bodies tells the story of a collective whose ghost hovers over European territory.   Zaides and his team uses a hybrid methodology consisting partly of a documentary and investigative approach, partly of choreographic practice. This growing archive, this map, this invisible landscape is stretching in all directions across space and time, interrelating the mythologies, histories, geographies and anatomies of those who have been granted entrance to NECROPOLIS. Freedom of movement needs to be returned to the bodies who are admitted to Europe as corpses. And although in the City of the Dead there is no-body left to dance, it is exactly that no-body, that body of the bodies - the body of NECROPOLIS - which Zaides aims to animate back to life.   On stage, members of the team present the result of their investigation and delve into the darkest recesses of the list. It is an invitation to partake in the sensory discovery of a ghostly virtual territory, to question your actions, your sense of accountability as well as your role as a citizen.  • Arkadi Zaides is an independent Israeli choreographer and visual artist, of Belarusian origin, currently living in France. After a career as dancer, he embarked on his own artistic path. He focuses on the ways in which political and social contexts affect the movements and gestures of bodies. He collaborated on Jozef Wouters’ Infini #1 and toured around the world with his solo Archive.  In 2019, he participated in the Kaaitheater symposium ‘The School of Speculative Documentary’.    “Arkadi Zaides places himself in this vein between performance and dance which proves, and this is a very current struggle, that movement is not only made up of the living.” - Toute la Culture