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i’m haunting you now (2018)



13-minute video with text and animation by Nicola van Straaten and four-channel soundtrack (mixed binaurally for headphones) by Coila-Leah Enderstein.

The video was made to be projected onto stage curtains in a large black box theatre as the middle section of Nicola van Straaten’s final performance in her Solo Authorship in Dance Masters at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz (HZT) in Berlin, titled “i'm haunting you now”, for which Coila-Leah also served as dramaturgical consultant. The four-channel soundtrack played through speakers positioned in each of the room's top corners.



Performance at HZT, 2018. Images by Marc Seestadt

The 45-minute solo performance presented an exploration of unsettling silences in colonial history and the ways in which certain bodies are haunted by imperial relations. The middle section's ghostly wordplay invites the public to sit with the discomfort of colonial history.

The entire work was performed for two consecutive nights at Ufer Studios, Berlin, in November 2018. The work was an early iteration of Nicola's ongoing research into embodied negotiations of coloniality.

Full video available here.