Scomodo

Cinzia Schincariol and Matt Shilcock (SA)

Scomodo is a durational performance work where two dance artists obsessively deconstruct and reconstruct a wheelchair, exploring the boundaries between humans and their machines.

Cinzia Schincariol is an independent artist based in South Australia and currently Berlin, working across performance, community and health through mediums such as dance, voice, drawing, photography and film. Her practice is grounded in embodiment, instant composition, accessibility, compassion and a relationship with the natural environment. Matt Shilcock is a South Australian choreographer, dancer, actor and creative producer. He has developed a choreographic methodology and movement language, Osteogenuine, that combines his interests in dance, alchemy, and holistic healing.

Both artists are interested in the body as a political landscape, cyborg theory, and discomposure, all themes for exploration in this performance work named after the Italian word for ‘uncomfortable’.

Creative Team: Co-creators and performers – Cinzia Schincariol and Matt Shilcock

This project is supported by Arts South Australia, the Richard Llewellyn Arts and Disability Trust and Australian Dance Theatre.
Image: Sam Roberts

Published on

25 September

Live+Local

Adhocracy In Conversation panel: Humans and the non-human: representation, collaboration and disobedience
Friday September 4 at 8pm

Adhocracy In Conversation panel: Art-making, activism and lived experience: the complexities and intersections
Friday September 25 at 8pm

Residency Outcome

A response to The Cyborg Manifesto within a state of discomfort. 

During our Adhocracy time, we started deconstructing Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Online and within different time zones, we tackled its complexity through joint reading, awakening a novel experience to the way we have ever worked together before. 

Fascinated by words which meaning often had to be confirmed, we kept finding inspirations all pointing us to feel the boundaries between human and machine, within the context of assistive technology and mobility aid devices and particularly inspired by the lived experiences. 

We have been really touched by the word ‘affinity’ as a different approach to identity politics, and the suggestion to look at the Cyborg, who Haraway defines as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”, for the affinities between animals and machines. 

Meeting the word ‘heterochronic’ sparked a question: ‘when is a wheel chair born?’ Inspired by human embryology processes and by the writing of Emanuele Coccia on the process of immersion and compenetration as part of the ontology of the atmosphere, we wondered what was like to visualise a wheelchair that doesn’t exist yet, as a machine supposed to enable needs and desires fulfillment. 

We have been working toward a unified bricolage, where the organic and the mechanical synergistically function together in a polyphony of working parts; we are clearly just at the beginning, where the wheelchair is still at the imagination level, hence is not ready yet to merge with the flesh, which will happen during our upcoming development in December.

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Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.