The Restitution of Complexity
THE RESTITUTION OF COMPLEXITY
The Restitution of Complexity is a performance by Nikolaus Gansterer and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll of live drawing, storytelling and sound that explores the body as archive. The performance is acoustically supported by musician Christopher Haworth. Improvising a state of constantly becoming something else, in collaboration, Carroll and Gansterer show the unconscious archives of Austria’s Stockholm Syndrome about its brief colony in Mexico, which ended with the assassination of Maximillian. A live video feed turns the sculptural accumulations that trace a delirious ficto-criticism into two dimensional projections. There are cameo appearances by Freud in Mexico, dreaming the demise of the empire. The Restitution of Complexity is based on a book about the return of the many complex agents who make up history, a history of humans’ relationships to objects and their restitution after conquest.
The Restitution of Complexity, 2017
A performance by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll & Nikolaus Gansterer, with sound by Christopher Haworth
10 parts, approx. 40 mins
Pen & ink, diagrams, paper, charcoal, paint, various objects, Mictlāntēcutli, leg rattles, flashlight, feather, sound, photographs, glass box, Quetzalcoatl, archives and the unconscious
Performances:
On 9th of November 2017 at IKON Gallery, in Birmingham and on 10th of November 2017, at ACF London, in the framework of the exhibition „Emotion + the Tech (no) body.“ Curated by Sally Golding (Unconscious Archives / OtherFilm).
Published in:
– The Contested Crown: Repatriation Politics between Europe and Mexico
, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (Ed.), University of Chicago Press, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-226-80206-0
– Parsing Digital (Ed.) Sally Golding, Cat. Exhib., Austrian Cultural Forum, London, 2018