Together With Touch is a live performance that takes place in a public space. The underlying theme of Mental Health is explored through the mediums of contemporary dance and live data that drives the music.
This project is part of the Virtual Artistic Exchange 2021, facilitated by long-standing partner and bangaloREsidency host Walkin Studios.
In the course of the pandemic, people have been forced to adapt to a “new normal”. Globally, already deteriorating mental health conditions were subsequently aggravated. Records show that India currently is among the countries with the highest number of suicides in South-east Asia. A recent survey by Suicide Prevention India Foundation (SPIF), a Bengaluru-based organisation, found that suicide ideation, depression and relapses are at an alltime high. Many are struggling with emotional and psychological problems enhanced through isolation and the lack of physical contact. The term “contact”, deriving from the Latin con- and -tangere, “together with touch”, has gained significant urgency in current circumstances.
While physical contact is being radically restricted, visual artist fromGermanyLena Heubusch invites performer and mental health specialist Avril Stormy Unger, sound engineer Nikhil Nagaraj and creative coder Gaurav Singh to converse at the intersection of their practices. Heubusch poses questions such as: How is contact perceived when organisms touch through the means of modern technology? How can we experience a sense of being body in the digital realm?
Avril Stormy Unger will physically respond to sound that is generated by live Twitter data; fed by the popular hashtags concerning mental health.
The performance will take place at 4 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. in Vega City Mall, Bangalore and will be live streamed on publicdomain.garden.
publicdomain.garden is a project conceptualised by Walkin Studios that explores the changing landscape of public life, and hybridity of the virtual and physical that we live in.
