With what do we chose to see? ~ by Nada Gambier
Nada Gambier's "With what do we chose to see?" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliani) at the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).
Here you will find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.
Redacted Sight
Nada's question: With what do we chose to see?
Nada's intro:
A shredder churns, swallowing the redacted,
page after page, body after body.
The shredder doesn't blink-it digests limbs, names, lives, reducing flesh to data, identity to ash, silencing the vanishing of those already lost to shadow—
unseen, ignored, folded into silence.
Green suits hover across the void-figures to be erased.
Somewhere, violence conducts its orchestra:
tearing, ripping, collapsing-not chaos, but policy.
The narrative-an impossible jigsaw. Pieces missing.
The story stutters, breaks.
What's left are holes-in the archive, in the flesh, in the mind.
History rewritten with gaps wide as wounds, vision blurred by propaganda,
memory redacted until nothing remains but the engineered silence. Eyes strain at the gaps-retinas scorched by what we don’t see. Consciousness edited frame by frame.
What if we let the blank spaces speak? Do we hear them?
Starring in order of disappearance:
Nada Gambier
Nika Pećarina
Ilja Schamlé
Dory Samuel
Leo Hugendubel
jip van der hek
Liam Warren
Tech assistant:
Henriks Zegners
Grant's report:
There are four light bulbs suspended in mid-air. Dry ice spreads across the stage as the audience arrives and take their seats. A figure dressed in a green body suite sits cross legged on the floor feeding sheets of paper into a paper shredder. The sound of the paper being shredded is magnified as a soundtrack. A second figures in a green body suits enters the stage and the two of them sit back to back and perform slow choreographed movements. We hear the sound of smashing glass, then a building being demolished, while in the background a phone rings. A third figure in a green body suit with additional arms attached appears. Now there are four of them, all moving about at ground level. Then a fifth enters, then a sixth. The performers wander across the stage making gestures, some of them balletic, and the soundtrack shifts to a ripping and tearing, then abruptly it stops while the choreography continues. The sound returns, only now much louder than before, it echoes through the auditorium. To signal the end of the performance, one of the green figures extinguishes the lights, grasping and twisting the lightbulbs in their sockets, and the six green figures exit the stage while the sound continues at an increased volume. As the audience sits in the dark the noise become deafening and almost unbearable as we hear a missile strike, explosions, the destruction of bricks and mortar.
Barby Asante also notes the question - with what do we choose to see? During the performance she felt that she had to refer to the abstract the artist had written about the piece what the artist was trying to portray and what the audience perceives. She was interested by the paper being shredded and the redacting of documents, and how what came out of the shredder was green. She was thinking about the associations of that colour. Is there a discussion here about disappearance? The sound at the end of bombs felt connected to an erasure that she didn't quite understand and she became confused as to what the connections where.
Zairong Xiang says he wants to think with the artist’s question – With what do we choose to see? Because during the performance eyes are constantly switching between the human and the cinema eye, maybe because of the green figures, which in cinema you can fill out. Towards the end of the performance he thought about how different genres were brought together in the piece including cinema, theatre, and sculptural forms. He found the figures ghostly but also present, the sounds unsettling, but this worked for the piece. Zairong wants to return to the green figures. He feels that the artist is showing a possible scenario of something we otherwise don’t see. As if this was a film set, and in the final version things would be speeded up. He thinks the piece is about showing something that we don't see and feels that it is quite complete in terms of the experience of the work.
Sandi Hilal congratulates the artist and says that aesthetically the work was rich. But she was wondering in regards to the artist’s question, what her mother would make of such a piece. Does she herself even have the codes to understand it? Is she making a fool of herself not knowing what she should say about it? Maybe that could become an interesting part of the work. She would be curious to open the work up to other voices in terms of what is it that we see.
