Michael Klien & Davide Terlingo

b. Austria, 1970, Italy

During 2005 Daghdha distributed almost 10,000 stainless steel rings in Cork. The ring is a symbol of an expanded community, an invitation to actively engage with each other, acknowledging potential in seemingly ordinary encounters. Anyone can become a performer simply by wearing an Iris ring. Each Iris ring comes with a set of five simple, written instructions. Each instruction invites the wearer of a ring to show a physical or mental response whenever he or she meets someone wearing the same ring. Iris has a life of its own: rings can change owners; responses can be followed or developed into personal tasks.

Dispersed across the space and time of the city, Iris can never be fully grasped. We can only know what directly relates or happens to us, and gather the rest as traces left behind in a landscape of stories. Here, the choreographers’ work is not centred on the creation of a tangible artefact, but on the facilitating of a social dynamic. The work created the human patterns of being and moving, becoming a choreographic work at once ephemeral and playful, the ring becoming the key to a world of invisible links.

(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)