For his final presentation, François Dominique Pisapia transforms Echo Correspondence into a Cabaret. Starting with an outdoor screening, the evening unfolds into live musical and dance performances from CECILIA and PRICE, accompanied by shining shadows and slithery silhouettes. 

Featuring fashion by Werkstätte Brigitte Meier-Schomburg, a Vienna-based haute couture designer, and a special presentation of archival images of her work, the night promises Glamour! Dress the part! After the show, the space will slip into something sexy and turn into a dance party. 

François Dominique Pisapia (*1990, Montréal, CA) is an artist and filmmaker living and working in Berlin. His artistic practice moves through sculpture, installation, photography, performance and video, channeling the amateur and the scavenger to frame desires in cinematic images of love and decay. Throughout his residency at Echo Correspondence, Pisapia was able to develop and experiment with mediated liveness, by integrating film, music, & performance alongside collaborating creatives. Even A Rose Has A Shadow is an event that Pisapia has tailored specifically to the format of Echo Correspondence taking place on July 30th, and is his final presentation as the inaugurating resident.

Pisapia completed a BFA in Design from Concordia University and graduated from the Städelschule film class of Douglas Gordon, having also studied with Laure Prouvost, Gerard Byrne and Wu Tsang. His work has been screened and exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), Staedel Museum (Frankfurt), Mal Seh’n Kino (Frankfurt), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Czech Centre (New York) and Centre Clark (Montréal). 

CECILIA is a Canadian multi disciplinary artist and performer currently based in Paris. She primarily works with music, developing an experimental sound which blends the cinematic and the intimate with the elemental. Her compositions and multimedia stage performances make use of voice, citation, recitation and documentary field recordings in narrations of loss, romanticism and spiritual quest for embodied love. Her approach to music is at once lyrical, tactile and sculptural.  She released her first full-length album  Adoration  on Houston-based Rabit's label Halcyon Veil. The 33 minute LP followed 2017's visual EP Charity Whore released on Yves Tumor's Grooming Label. Her new project 'Summer in Sexilia’ came out this year via Ohxy's Xquisite Releases based in London. 

Cecilia has performed performed at the Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique in Paris (France), BNA Alter Museum of Kyoto (Japan), Gui Gallery in Beijing (China), Contemporary Center for Performing Arts of Lausanne (Switzerland), Macao Club in Milan (Italy),  The White Hotel in Manchester (UK), Laboral Theatre in Gijon (Spain), Berlin’s Center for Spatial Sound, MONOM (Germany).

PRICE work is characterised by elaborate soundscapes, costumes and stage design often developed in collaborative constellations. His performances alternate between total immersion and the abrupt unmasking of the means of theatrical staging. Part of this involves the emotional work that has to be invested in order to maintain the fiction of the performer’s individual identity—a genuine expenditure that is always also an effect, like the artificially shimmering sweat on his forehead. These are not the irreconcilable oppositions of artificial and authentic around which he moves. Rather, PRICE is interested in the conflicting relationship between these socially normative categories, the realm of which is the (queer) self, the (queer) body. Misfit costumes reference a variety of other possible forms of wearing by different bodies; instances of stumbling and struggling sneak into PRICE’s work. For him, failure is always also part of a queer strategy: an indifference to assimilation, rigid identities and the demands on the self in digital capitalism. It is a second- degree failure that is always part of the presentation.

Performances, inter alia, at Swiss Dance Days 2019, Kunsthalle Basel, 1.1 Space for Zeitgeist, Dampfzentrale and Stadtgalerie Bern; Helmhaus, Tanzhaus, Kunsthalle Zürich, Bar3000, Cabaret Voltaire Zürich; Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Center and Le Bourg, Les Urbaines Festival Lausanne; Centre for Contemporary Art and KEM Warsaw; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Le Commun, Geneva; Vrankrijk, FLAM Festival Amsterdam; Beursschouwburg, Performatik festival, Batard festival, Rosa Brux, Brussels; STUK – House for Dance, Image & Sound, Leuven; MAD House Helsinki; Human Resources, NAVEL, and PAM Los Angeles; My Wild Flag MDT Stockholm, mumok and Burgtheater Kasino within ImPulsTanz Festival Vienna, Galpao Bela Maré and Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro.