Performance: Lagging Bodies by multiple artists

On 20 November, Nxt Museum will host Lagging Bodies, a performance programme bringing together artists exploring the frictions between bodies and technologies. The project focuses on moments of delay, imperfection, and disconnection that emerge when embodied experiences encounter accelerated, quantified, and optimised technological systems. Rather than viewing the body’s inability to meet technological standards as a failure, Lagging Bodies celebrates imperfection and friction through performance. It foregrounds the physical, emotional, messy, and unpredictable qualities of the body, challenging the smoothness and standardisation promoted by digital platforms, algorithms, and AI. By bringing bodily experiences into the digital realm, the programme proposes alternative perspectives grounded in hope, gratitude, friction, and realism.

The project takes as its starting point Richard Brautigan’s poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (1968), which imagines a cybernetic ecology grounded in mutual care. Building from this idea, Julie Goslinga will screen her short film Sara, accompanied by a live performance in which the performer’s voice guides the audience through the work. The performance reflects on sexuality, language, and digital circulation, questioning how intimacy and desire are mediated and perceived.

The next performance, Protocols of Gratitude, draws on purification rituals to unfold as a ceremony of gratitude dedicated to the machines of Nxt Museum. During the ceremony, the museum’s machinic infrastructure is no longer treated merely as a tool for use, but takes on a protagonist role, creating a temporary reversal of the relationship between humans and machines.

The event will conclude with HYMN. The performer, embodying a mermaid who chooses to die, explores issues of gender, desire, violence, mortality, and care through a demanding choreography that influences the visuals and sound of the room. Here, technology becomes a medium for delay, doubling, and transformation, creating tension between the present body and its digital residue.

Julie Goslinga, Ginevra Petrozzi, Ines Borovac, Lucia Fernandez Santoro & Agustín Martínez Caram