Filters: Ghosts Between Us

Performance, 2023

A live performance exploring fractured communication, haunted intimacy, and the fragile membranes that separate and connect us.

Project Statement

Filters: Ghosts Between Us examines the thresholds between private and public, home and outside, what is seen and what is hidden. Performed inside a translucent cell, the piece unfolds as an ambiguous dialogue with the audience: shadows stretch, ghostly figures are drawn and projected, and fragments of a livestream slip across the membrane, offering incomplete glimpses of a self behind layers of mediation.

Ghosts here are both protectors and barriers, the spectral presences that filter communication, distorting truth and intimacy. The membrane is not only physical but emotional, digital, and social: a fragile surface where we long to be understood yet remain divided, our reality refracted through trauma, technology, and survival strategies.

This performance is part of an ongoing artistic research exploring membranes of relation, the thresholds where connection trembles between exposure and concealment. The logic of the membrane reappears in Dis-Place (where memory artefacts are separated yet animated by performance scores), in Lines (performances mediated by screens), and in Achiamma (digital grief maps layered with partial visibility). Across these works, the membrane recurs as a space where memory, intimacy, and relation are never fully given, only partially held and filtered.

Audience Response

“Your performance shook me up… I waited for release, but it never came. The filter refused a clear view, refused redemption. It made me feel what art can do: confront, awaken, unsettle, question my expectations. The filter remained, and I was changed.” – Biel, Switzerland, 2023

Future Iterations

This piece will evolve in future versions, deepening its spatial and sonic architecture. It opens questions about how digital mediation, trauma, and longing shape the ways we attempt to be seen – and whether intimacy can survive being filtered.

Performance

Live Performance: Der Ort in Biel, Switzerland, November 25, 2023.

Mentors: Charlotte Hug and Sabina Leone

Credits: Ursula Wandfluh and Peter Harle-Cowan