Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments
Commissioned by The Guggenheim Museum New York
Developed at Medialab Matadero
First commissioned by BEK Bergen
Next performance: La Ferme du Buisson, 30 Nov. 2024, 18.30, Free entry! click here for more info!
Admiror is a collaborative performance work by artists Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen that stages an opposition between the sentimental logic of liberalism and the feelings that propel liberation. With music and live drums by Cameron Graham and CGI design and animation by Rudá Babau.
A decade before publishing his magnum opus “The Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith released his less discussed premise for the ethical foundation of free market economy in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Moral sentiments, linked to the feeling of “sympathy”, rested on the imaginative affordances of the spectator. Together, sympathy and imagination formed the emotional order that enabled the operation of free market capitalism.
The title — Admiror — refers to a baroque hand gesture that requires throwing hands up in the air in an expression of awestruck worship, love or astonishment. In baroque performance, every gesture precisely expresses the sentiment underlying the text: from the position of the heels, to the angle of the fingers, gesture provided “the people” with a vocabulary, developed over centuries, to assess the authenticity of the characters, understand their past and predict their future.
Admiror departs from this imaginative emotional role-play lubricating capital relations, and evolves into LARPing revolutionary pasts and contingent futures — French, Haitian, Iranian, and what’s yet to come. Moving through cycles of repetition and incremental change, the work choreographs the mechanics of imagination, from the baroque body to the modern market. It performs the affective underbelly of these structures, their inherent mysticism, and desirous qualities. Admiror tries to articulate the potential for thinking the subject of the revolution, and the process of “rehearsing new models”, at a time when the moral architecture of market liberalism and human rights is falling apart in front of our eyes, alternative social movements abound, yet universal liberation continues to be postponed.
Concept, Creative Direction, Text, Narrative: Bahar Noorizadeh and Klara Kofen
Sound and Composition: Cameron Graham
CGI design and animation: Rudá Babau
Animation Assistant: Pedro Sena
Additional Voice: Nick Houde
Baroque Movement Consultant: Dionysios Kyropoulos
