Concept, installation and choreography: Nagi Gianni
Performance and choreographic co-creation: Isabelle Chladek
Sound design: Diego Noguera Berg
Lighting design: Jacqueline Sobiszewski

After the Gesture is a performance-installation set within a gallery transformed into an unstable, liminal environment — at once domestic, artificial and provisional, suspended somewhere between a construction site, an abandoned film set and an interior waiting to be inhabited again. The floor, sections of the walls and the furniture are covered with plastic sheeting held together by fragments of coloured tape, creating a space in which material reality intersects with memory and mental drift.

At its centre, an elderly woman performs a series of gestures addressed to absent figures: extending a hand, inviting someone to dance, enacting a hand-kiss, adjusting an item of clothing, putting on and removing a glove. Initially recognisable as conventional forms of social interaction, the gestures begin to repeat, shift and break down. They lose their original function and become traces of relationships that have disappeared yet continue to inhabit bodily memory.

The performance explores ageing, loss, the persistence of desire and the body’s capacity to transform as established social roles and structures begin to dissolve. The glove — alternately an accessory, a surface, a mask or a container — becomes an instrument of metamorphosis. Combined with clay, water and flowers, it transforms the hands into heavy, ambiguous and almost foreign forms. A minimal sonic layer, built from the friction of plastic, breathing, movement, material sounds and intermittent bells, accompanies the gradual passage from a socially codified figure towards a more autonomous and unruly presence.

The project extends Nagi Gianni and Isabelle Chladek’s shared research into the body as a site of transformation, memory and social tension. It combines choreographic language with cinematic logic, drawing inspiration from Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad and Shūji Terayama’s Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. Chladek’s background in butoh is present in the work’s attention to bodily states, fragmented gesture and the slow transformation of presence.