Deborah Schamoni

The performance Kreb Core Cargo, newly conceived by Jo Penca (*1989) in collaboration with the electronic-duo Les Trucs, opens up an utopian change of perspective onto the relationship between humans and the world that surrounds them, resulting in an accessible spatial and sound installation on view for several weeks.

Kreb Core Cargo begins with the setting of a fishing port. Harbour workers find misshapen sea creatures in the cargo containers brought ashore. They tell each other ‘sailor’s yarn’ about the unusual creatures, slip into the unknown animal bodies and, through this transformative act, become crab creatures. By the ‘change of the shell’ social codes – for example repressive gender roles, or species-specific superiority – can be questioned. How does the crab shell change the way we look at the world?

Kreb Core Cargo is inspired by the work of biologist Lancelot Alexander and the process he described as ‘carcinisation’. Jo Penca’s environment-production is about a fictitious ‘crabbing’ of the human body. A process, at the end of which stands the overcoming of existing social structures such as capitalist, species-specific, and sexual repression

Jo Penca’s multifaceted artistic practice is characterised by a cross-disciplinary interplay of performing and visual arts. Kreb Core Cargo will transport the audience into an expansive production with an artistic set and costume design in the West Wing of the Haus der Kunst. Parallel events on various stages create an overlapping of temporal and spatial narratives. Conventional frontality is dissolved through new, exploratory encounters between the audience and the performers. The emphatic electronic sound environments of Les Trucs and sung dialogues also create fluid states that seem to dissolve the boundaries between reality and fiction, between science and mythology.

With Jo Penca’s new production Kreb Core Cargo, Haus der Kunst presents an important emerging artists from Munich, who works at the interface of visual arts, performance, theatre, and concert. She raises contemporary questions about diverse identities and an embedding of polymorphic human forms of existence in prevailing ecological, and gendered power structures. Penca strives for a process of healing scars acquired in togetherness.

Curated by Jana Baumann
Text: Haus der Kunst
Photos: Constanza Melendez