Life is. Life ends. Life is living with loose ends. Life is when it falls apart. Life is trying to hold your shit together. Life starts with a separation. Life. Lie. Link. Ink. Add water.

From the perspective of cell biology, every living growth is based on the process of mitosis: In five phases, it choreographs the movements of hundreds of proteins in nuclear and cell division. The smallest deviations lead to the dramatic distinction between regulated renewal and malignant proliferation, even in the laboratory.

In „Living Matters“ organic and inorganic bodies and substances meet and react with each other. After working with models from physics in „Some Significance“, Eva Meyer-Keller is now experimenting with the apparatus of molecular biology. She contaminates the field’s clinical procedures with traces of existential crises. Practices and basic assumptions from the everyday repertory of cell research are cultivated in an environment that fluctuates between workshop and kitchen, laboratory and landscape. The four performers work their way tirelessly through a never-ending chain of acts of sharing and multiplying, arranging and self-arranging. Instead of the order of things, the ordering of things comes to the fore: ‚life‘ as a biological principle that only takes shape as a result of schematic processes of marking and classifying under the microscope, overlaps with life as a confusing, obscure or even: lived overload. Is there a means of orientation that does not rise above things from the outset? And can stubbornly insisting on „doing things over and over again“ ultimately also be a chance to tell ‚realities‘ differently? (Text: Eva Meyer-Keller)

Photos: Ayala Gazit

Dramaturgy: Constanze Schellow

Research Companian: Ilya Noé