Sille Kima ~ All sun quiet down, all light pass through you
Sille Kima's "All sun quiet down, all light pass through you" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 2, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.
Here you will find the documentation of Sille Kima's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.
All sun quiet down, all light pass through you
Sille Kima's question: Where do I become you and you become someone else? And silence and light and silence
Sille's introduction: All sun quiet down, all light pass through you is a (stage) play with words, glimmers, darkness, light and who owns it. Through memory, a soft river of feelings tingling the skin, the surface, the muddy boundaries between you and I, near and far.
Agathe stands in the middle of the forest, looking up. Later, in the violet twilight, the stars will be up. But not yet. The wind is changing the patterns falling on her shoulders, the skies above the heavy canopy beating relentlessly in fiery blue. Now she is further, stopped by a call not her own. In the glow of the not-yet-inbetween, the sticky warmth of the heavy sun pulling at her hair. By the tickles at the back of her throat, she already knows this feeling of herself dispersing, being in multiple places at once. Stepping behind her, she turns and faces the sun.
Bethany's report: The performance begins with the performer on stage, sharing a script with the audience and respondents. They read from the text while speaking, setting a reflective and intimate tone. Soon, they invite the audience to follow them into a new space, where acoustic music plays softly. In this space, a group of people sit near a window, holding fragments of mirrors and gently catching and reflecting light.
One performer stands at the window, bathed in sunlight, speaking as they interact with the light. The mirror holders shift their mirrors to catch the light more easily, creating a dance of glimmers across the roof. The scattered fragments of broken mirrors on the floor enhance the choreography of light, while someone begins to hum quietly in the background, adding a subtle sonic layer to the interplay of illumination and reflection.
The performer, staring ahead, recites a text, addressing someone who stands silently mouthing the same words. Their interaction feels intimate, as if they are mirroring each other’s thoughts. This exchange grows in intensity, their words syncing and diverging in a rhythm that mimics the refractions of light. The performance explores themes of reflection, refraction, and absorption, not just of light but of stories, memories, and experiences, transformed through another's presence.
As the exchange evolves, the performer ceases to mirror or reflect, instead listening and absorbing what the other conveys. Humming continues intermittently, creating a grounding atmosphere. The performer then shifts focus, speaking to the lights on the ceiling while gazing upwards, describing a scene, scenarios, and how their bodies interact with light. Their words explore the layers of light’s presence, both in physical spaces and in stories, as well as its symbolic and experiential interactions.
The hum transitions into song as a triad of performers begins to sing and hum together. The intensity of the sound builds, as others join in, refracting and alternating the melody. The soundscape grows prismatic, like the shifting light in the room, layering voices that both echo and transform the original hum. The performance becomes a convergence of light, sound, memory, and interaction, offering a sensory meditation on reflection, transformation, and connection.
Antonia Majaca: Antonia shared a memory from when she was around ten years old, living with her grandparents by the river. Her grandfather, a carpenter, went out one winter day when the boats along the river were all turned upside down to protect them from the season’s weather. As the river swelled, it would collect trash, which often became trapped in the upturned boats. That day, her grandfather returned and told her he had found a book stuck on one of the boats. He dried it by the fireplace so she could read it.
She read the book, and many years later, she encountered an installation at a biennale that unexpectedly brought the memory flooding back. The installation consisted of a space overlooking a canal, where reflections of the water shimmered on a polished floor. In the center of the room was a single naked lamp, quivering and shaking slightly. At first, she didn’t know what it was meant to evoke, but then it struck her—it was from the book. Specifically, it reminded her of a scene where the characters made love behind the shutters.
For Antonia, this performance echoed that experience. It conjured memories of the river and the flow of reflections—both literal and metaphorical. She found it deeply beautiful, a piece that invited her to think about the river not just as a physical space, but as a dynamic, unstable place filled with movement and memory. The instability was, for her, fantastic, creating a peculiar intimacy through the mediation of tools and the interplay of elements. She described the performance as deeply poetic, introverted yet shareable, a moment of reflection and connection that resonated profoundly.
Ramon Amaro: Ramon shared that, while he didn’t necessarily have a specific memory to connect to the performance, he found a deep comfort in the act of piecing together seemingly incompatible elements. For him, this process—assembling disparate fragments into patterns—facilitates a negotiation of deeper thoughts that might struggle to find expression in more conventional mediums. He compared this to scientific structures, where bringing together seemingly unrelated pieces often leads to new discoveries. He saw this as a subversive act, a way to strip away conventional understandings and engage with a somatic experience that blurs reality, enabling access to a different type of understanding.
During the performance, he recalled hearing the performer mention "mysteries of the sun," which sparked his curiosity. A quick search brought him to an article about a “mystery object” that is ten million times brighter than the sun, a phenomenon that remains unexplained even after extensive study. This idea of excessive brightness led him to think about the speculative and the sonic, recalling a canonical science fiction work titled Brighter than the Sun. He drew a connection between these speculative ideas and the moment in the performance when the performer began singing, introducing layers of texture and communication that mirrored the excessive brilliance of the phenomenon he had read about.
Ramon reflected on mythscience, a concept pioneered by Sun Ra, and the pathways it creates to access other worlds through phenomena that seem almost too excessive for our comprehension. He appreciated how the performance embraced this mystical excess, allowing it to exist without the need for explanation or resolution. For Ramon, this suggested a new level of compassion with the self—a willingness to exist in harmony with experiences or phenomena that don’t necessarily need to fit into established frameworks.
He noted the vulnerability inherent in this process, which requires accepting the contingency of one’s experience. Self-care, he suggested, lies in the ability to confront shadows, to navigate them with trust in oneself, and to resist the temptation of ego. This, for him, was a striking element of the performance—a refusal to conform to rigid links or expectations, and instead a willingness to embrace the unknown.
Ramon also considered the archival nature of art, which is often preserved on the assumption that it must be captured and reflected upon later. In contrast, he saw this performance as a singular moment, one that resists being archived or reduced to the past. To fully capture it, he mused, would require archiving the performer herself—a task he deemed impossible. Instead, he suggested that the performance invites us to accept and engage with it as it is, in its fleeting singularity.
Ramon expressed gratitude for the way the performance helped him reflect on compassion—both for himself and for those who cannot bear to face something as overwhelmingly bright as the sun. This idea of embracing the limits of sight, of existence, and of understanding resonated deeply with him, leaving him with a profound appreciation for the experience.
Inti Guerrero: Inti reflected on the performance, describing himself as “triggered in a good way.” He proposed titling the experience 10 Thousand Suns as a nod to the radiance and the different ways of understanding that the piece evoked. One of the aspects that stood out to him was the narrative woven through the performance and its dramaturgy, which placed the audience in a future many years from now. This temporal shift was significant, as it prompted him to consider the sun not only as a symbol of light and warmth but also in relation to the current climate crisis and the heating of the planet.
For Inti, the performance highlighted the relationship between this radiance and the prevalent "doom theory" narrative, which he identified as dominant in Western media. This narrative of inevitable apocalypse, he argued, often strips us of agency and distracts from the ongoing fights we must undertake to change the world. He referenced the thoughts of Brazilian Indigenous writer and environmental activist Ailton Krenak, who critiques the notion of the end of the world as "a great excuse for us to do nothing." Krenak's idea, as Inti explained, challenges the ease with which people imagine the world’s end while resisting the harder work of creating meaningful change.
The performance, for Inti, touched on a kind of post-apocalyptic imagination, one that emphasizes the delicate balancing acts required to sustain our ecosystems. He found a poignant parallel in the imagery of the family who died in a car crash and the mirror the performer carried, which served as a reflective device—both literally and metaphorically. This mirror, he suggested, symbolized how we move forward by looking at the past. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s work, he emphasized that we exist as historical bodies, shaped by the histories we carry with us. The current global discourse, he observed, often suffers from ignorance of history and a refusal to engage with historicity.
Inti also praised the dramaturgy of the performance, particularly the minimal yet powerful gesture of the reflected window on the floor, which transformed into a sculptural element. He found this reflection a strikingly intelligent and poetic touch, one that subtly enhanced the thematic richness of the piece. The layering of light, history, and narrative created a profound meditation on how we balance looking forward with remembering the past.
AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 ~ Chameleon Orbit
About Sille Kima