Melissa Schriek - The City is a Choreography
WORDS BY HANNAH GEDDES
Dutch photographer Melissa Schriek explores the relationship between the body and its environment in her recent project The City is a Choreography. By photographing individuals interrupting public spaces and performing for the camera, she questions how we relate to each other and the world around us.
The body is key to Schriek’s practice. She often uses the female form, placing it in obscure positions and making pictures in urban environments. The City is a Choreography explores the contemporary built environment. In one image we see a girl with long ginger hair, standing with her head against a boarded-up shop front, looking down at her Dr. Martens boots. In another image, two girls lie on top of each other over a street bollard, as if they have become part of the urban landscape. Their bodies are manipulated, captured in a state of flux. The result is a sculptural performance, that allows us to think about our relationship to the places that we live and spend our time, the streets we walk every day and the buildings that we pass.
By placing people in deserted urban environments, often in slumped or twisted positions, she questions the “disconnection between the city and youth that resides within.” Living in urban environments can be an isolating experience. The defeatist posture of the slumped and twisted bodies in Schriek’s images is a perfect representation of the hopelessness that many of us feel. This is particularly evident in this social and political climate in which our future is being decided upon by the older voting electorate, who often reside outside of the urban centres that Schriek photographs.
Schriek’s presence is always felt in her work as the photographer behind the camera also becomes choreographer. Setting out these staged scenes is an important part of the project. She explains that, “[her] work is often created with a performative approach, aesthetically and conceptually exploring the border between staged and documentary photography.” These images recall the work of Austrian photographer Erwin Wurm who also uses the body as a sculptural object, featuring anonymous participants who interact with everyday objects to create an image that makes us question our relationship to the objects that we use and interact with on a daily basis. Like Schriek’s images, there’s an element of the absurd, which makes you take a second look as you are drawn into the performance taking place behind the camera.
The urban space has been claimed by the female body and the young. Freedom is a huge concern in our current climate and in 2018 a yearly survey, Freedom in the World, recorded the 13th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. This is a terrifying statistic and one that is only getting worse. As Andrew Hewitt has said ‘‘The freedom of bodies moving through a space is the very basis of political freedom’’. This (edited) quote is what Schriek thinks of when she reflects on her project The city is a choreography. Through creating staged images and reclaiming the urban space, Schriek forces us to question our relationships with the people and the spaces that we live in with the hope of making us readdress how we operate and communicate in our shared environment.