A new work made with media artist Alysha Seriani and composer Sasha J. Langford. Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance, “whereverever” playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?” Premiering at the Western Front, May 26 and 27, 7:00 pm, and May 28, 4:00pm

Recorded on location in Mardon + Mitsuhashi’s respective ancestral homelands, Finland and Japan, the video intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and observational images of the built and natural environments with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. As the video cuts rhythmically between each place, it oscillates between a sense of distance and presence, past and present, as Mardon + Mitsuhashi orientate themselves as visitors to their hereditary homes and construct a postcard for their future kin. A sampled glitch in the soundtrack, anaglyph effect on images, and a doubling in framing across the two places, disrupts a sense of linear time to unfold a vastness of relations.

In the dance performance that follows, Mardon + Mitsuhashi unfold a movement practice of “blurring” to a musical score performed live by Langford. Through a score of improvisational tasks, they perform a duet of imperfect unison in which dance becomes a devotional technology to understand their bodies differently, both in relation to each other and the histories they hold.