Paired artist → Ceschi + Lane with Greenham (NL)

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alternative echelons is part of an ongoing research and performance series to challenge colonial infrastructures and reconsider our capture through surveillance. Our action as research involved a workshop | performance | ritual | protest by the Google datacenter in Eemshaven, NL, and around the industrial complex. We were searching for a Dutch undersea internet cable, the COBRAcable, that emerges onto the land at this site. We searched through our phones, extensions of our bodies, and through ‘the internet’ in a re-choreography of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s performance 'Cloud Net'. We are adorned with costumes made up of our phones and Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s relational objects. Our costumes are our interface for sensing the incomprehensible. This work repeats the actions of an event in 2019, on the british sovereign land base of Dhekelia, in Cyprus. The military base is home to a listening station, which is part of Five Eyes - a network of surveillance made through an alliance between native english speaking countries. This infrastructure enacts colonial surveillance, it is an invisible, pervasive force perpetuating online discrimination and racial bias. We are trying to understand nationalistic perspectives in our education and upbringing. As performers we are british, greek, turkish and cypriot, all nationalities involved in the contested history of the island of Cyprus.

n Artist's Bio h

Amy Pickles is an artist and loosely formed educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution - of knowledge, tools, finances - and collaboration are ways to refuse individual ownership.

t Credits o

Director, Producer & Editor h Amy Pickles
Director of Photography u Ana Buljan
Sound Design & Composition q Max Franklin
Performed by x Christina Karagianni, George Rallis, Merve Kılıçer, Amy Pickles
This work was funded by Gemeente Rotterdam Cultural Subsidie, and supported by Filmwerkplaats and WORM Rotterdam, NL.