Kajsa Wadhia & Maria Stiernborg
Residency presentation

Jackrabbit Parole is an attempt to escape from accelerating capitalism, from an arbitrary power that infiltrates our emotions and desires. It is a breakout doomed to failure, a collection of highly unreliable artistic experiments with the purpose to parasitise the illness of society and invert its symptoms into resistance. The performance duo The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra embrace their own paranoia and schizophrenic tendencies and try to trick the system by putting its own rottenness to use.

Jackrabbit Parole is a low intensity performance that unfolds during four weeks in a tower outside of MDT. The tower will be used as a watch tower, signal tower, hiding place, studio and stage. Spectators can choose to stay for shorter or longer periods, and the work is ongoing, also without an audience.

The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra is a performance duo consisting of Maria Stiernborg and Kajsa Wadhia. Since 2013 they have been touring their first performance in Sweden, Finland and Britain, for example to Marabouparken, Stockholm, Köttinspektionen, Uppsala, Inkonst, Malmö, Kiasma, Helsingfors and TripSpace Projects, London. They have also performed a commissioned piece ”The Blob” during Deleuze Studies Daughters of Chaos International Conference at Konstfack, Stockholm. Stiernborg & Wadhia previously worked together in performing arts collective Arena Baubo.

In their artistic work they are searching for what postition, inside a capitalist system, the artist needs to take, when the main commodity is creativity. They propose that symptoms of illness, produced by society, can be used as artistic tools and inverted into political resistence. Rather than suggesting solutions, they investigate what happens if we do not try to make things easy, but instead allow for dysfunction, frictions and delays by using disengagement, anti-relational aesthetics, obstruction, rigidity, nonsense, repetition and slowness as artistic methods. www.disengagedfreejazz.com

Kajsa Wadhia works in the fields of performance, text and choreography and holds an MA in New Performative Practices from DOCH, Stockholm. She places her artistic practice in the context of an over productive and accelerating society, and responds by turning exhaustion into resistance and anti-climax into fulfillment. Since 2016 she is co-directing the new artist run performance venue Köttinspektionen Dans in Uppsala with Tove Salmgren.

Maria Stiernborg holds a Bachelor from Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and a Master from Konstfack, Art in the Public Realm. She works in performance, theatre and text och is mainly thinking about how the artist can be the least useful, and how that, as a practice, can communicate to an audience. She is also co-directing Förlaget with Ludvig Uhlbors since 2012.