PRICE
*1986, lives and works between Switzerland and Brasil

PRICE work is characterised by elaborate soundscapes, costumes and stage design often developed in collaborative constellations. His productions play with the audience’s expectations of the exposed, ostensibly authentic self of the performer, who emotes before their eyes. They are interspersed with pop-cultural set pieces, mechanical sounds, rhythms and his own singing voice. The voice forms a central element of his work. PRICE views it as an acoustic form of emotional communication outside language’s imperative to create meaning.

In PRICE’s work, different spaces—each with their own economies, mechanisms of historicisation and exclusion, norms and potentials—overlap: the stage of theater and performance, the club, digital space, the fashion runway, the exhibition space. The drama known as PRICE unfolds against the backdrop of spaces divided into their individual, constituent parts.

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.

Selected performances and exhibitions
2023 Lecture Performance at ETH Department of Architecture Zurich CH
12 installation “Untitled” at Swiss Art Award CH
“Ideas Of Touch (sequences)”, 2023 Arsenic Lausanne CH 
“I Try My Tongue (sequences)” CAPC Musée d’art
“I Try My Tongue (sequences)” MUDAM – The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg
Contemporain de Bordeaux FR
2022 Echo Correspondence, Vienna, Austria
Ephemera Festival, Warsaw, Poland
Perrrformat, Zürich Art Weekend, Zürich, Switzerland
Workshop Back to the Leave with Michele Rizzo, Lateral Roma, Rome, Italy
2021 PRICE concert performance, True Sentiments, Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, France
Group exhibition - Movie Buff, Allstars, Lausanne, Switzerland
Proximities, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome, Italy
Swiss Art Awards, Basel, Switzerland
2020 PRICE joins Scalable Skeletal Escalator by Isabel Lewis, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Prologue: Mantras for a Club, Stadtgalerie Bern, Switzerland
Sequences of Mantras for a Club (sequences), My Wild Flag at MDT, Stockholm, Switzerland
Sequences of Mantras for a Club (sequences), Bela Maré, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
2019 Sequences of Mantras for a Club (sequences), How To Show Up, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sequences of Mantras for a Club (sequences), PAM residency, Los Angeles, USA
Melodies are so far my best friend, Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium
Melodies are so far my best friend, Tanzhaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
2018 Where Do You Wanna Go Today (Variations), Swiss Performance Art Award, Switzerland
process sharing of: Melodies are so far my best friend, NAVEL Los Angeles, USA
Where Do You Wanna Go Today (Variations) Hit Gallery, San Francisco, USA
Where Do You Wanna Go Today (Variations), Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
Residencies
2022 PIVO Sao Paulo, Recherche Residency, Sao Paulo, Brasil
2021 Palazzo Trevisan degli Ulivi, Swiss cultural foundation Pro Helvetia, Venice, Italy
ETOPIA Center for Art and Technology, Zaragoza, Spain
2020 La Becque, Vevey, Switzerland
Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome, Italy
Basel Social Club 11 – 18 June 2023
A Familiar Hole
24 September — 29 October 2022
Website
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