Curated and initiated by the Iranian dance theorist and choreographer Maryam Bagheri Nesami, folded possibilities is a festival within a festival. It is an ongoing process and an extension to the Multiplié dance festival and The Trondheim Fringe Festival. In 2023, folded possibilities hosted two performative events during the Multiplié dance festival: Walk & Talk and aRound Table.

In 2024, folded possibilities acts on the urgency to embrace practices that challenge the status-quo of public spaces, civic engagement, and ethical modes of artistic citizenship through a week-long event named a library that ( ) folds.

a library that ( ) folds runs simultaneously and as a part of Multiplié Dance Festival and Trondheim Fringe Festival and it is a pilot iteration of a wider curatorial process for Tiny Fest in Ōtautahi, Aotearoa (Christchurch, New Zealand). The program challenges the temporal and spatial boundaries of artistic events and decentralises where knowledge is located.

a library that ( ) folds

Curious about what a living and ever-changing library might look like, where memories and experiences are the pages to be read? Embodying a library as a performative event is to celebrate the coming together of the held and lost, the shelved and unshelved, ordered and dis/un-ordered; the permanent and ephemeral; the written, oral, and corporeal.

As a week-long event, a library that ( ) folds moves opposed to the long-lived Western mode of engaging with written literacy as the main understanding of how knowledge takes place. Where is knowledge located and in what forms it is valued? We ask ourselves in a world where knowledge is heavily oriented by the notions of authorship and literacy, what is knowledge? What is authorship? What is literacy?

Together with dance artist Janaína Moraes, a library that ( ) folds is conceived and curated to invite artists and audience to co-weave a live, corporeal, and experiential archive, through the practice of engaging encounters.

The event takes place at and is co-hosted by Havet Arena, NTNU and Rosendal Kafé. It is open to everyone. Come and go as you please and participate as much as you want to.

Sunday 14th april:

Name: Opening of the a Library that ( ) folds
Time: 17:00 - 19:00
Where: Havet - Heim

Monday 15th April:

Name: Revisiting Nina’s Solo
Time: 15:00 - 19:00
Where: HAVET - Ardna
Artist: Nina Wollny

“In Revisiting Nina’s Solo I invite you on a journey through the inside of my next body…”

Revisiting Nina’s Solo is a durational performance by and with Nina Wollny that had its premiere in Trondheim in May 2023. Through a deeply physical dance, she examined a multiplicity of bodies that are in a state of constant change, the body that has given birth, the body that has experienced spontaneous aborti on and the body that just changes with the passing of time. Now the process of revisiting continues. Nina will inhabit a space in the folded library in a durational performance event and invites you to join her when she folds and unfolds her next body with you.

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Name: Reading club
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Where: Havet - Heim

Come and book club! BYO book and/or favourite song/playlist for some reading and listening together with us.

Tuesday 16th April:

Name: Poetry reconstruction, a live library performance
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Where: HAVET - Heim
Artist: Asieh Amini & Ana Ghoreishian

This is about a performance with the idea of poetry reconstruction instead of translation. The idea is to reconstruct poetry, and the execution involves not only translating the content, but recreating concepts, language, metaphors, idioms and historical symbols in the dialogue between two or more experts (poet/translator).This hour-long performance showcases the process of transferring poetry from one language to another in a way that maintains the same concepts, metaphors, characteristics and poetic structure as much as possible.

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Name: Somatics of publication
Time: 15:00 - 19:00
Where: HAVET - Heim
Artists: Maryam Bagheri Nesami & Janaína Moraes

Somatics of publication is a guided choreo-graphic practice mediated by Maryam and Janaína. Come move with the notions of a library: we will engage with practices of writing // reviewing // editing // responding// as a dance event. You are welcome to move or witness.

Wednesday 17th April:

Name: Double bill: Ameretat: A Practice of Redemption & Possibilities
Time: 19:00 to 21:30
Where: HAVET - Djupet
Artists: Mitra ZiaeiKia & Shirin Farshbaf

Double bill of performance by 2 Iranian choreographers, Mitra ZiaeiKia & Shirin Farshbaf, followed by an artist talk. Read more

Thursday 18th April:

Name: Occupied Air; a workshop
Time: 15:00 - 17:30
Where: HAVET Heim
Artist: Shirin Farshbaf

In reference to the Deleuzian concept of indefinite body Polish physician Ludwick Rajchman writes: “One might speak of a principle of the indefiniteness of the body: each of us has a body in this indefinite sense, each of us is an anybody or is capable of becoming anybody. The indefiniteness of corporeal being is thus impersonal yet quite singular; to have a body, to be able to become anybody, is in fact what is most peculiar to each of us, even though it never reduces to anything particular about us.” This workshop is a journey of discovering a body with and without memories, trying to find a new space for the body in different air conditions (air as a part of our memory), and getting and sharing into the new circle of respiration.

Friday 19th April:

Name: Ways of arriving aRound (a) Table - Listening to stories with care
Time: 13:00 -15:00
Where: NTNU Kalvskinnet
Curated by: Maryam Bagheri Nesami & Susanna Hast.
Participating artists: Mitra ZiaieKia, Tone Pernille Østern, Kathy Barolsky, Janaína Moraes, Olaolu Lawal, Ronald Kibirige & Elen Øyen.

Ways of arriving aRound (a) Table will happen through small dances, waitings, ponderings, wanderings, writings, readings and more. This alternative mode of seminar invites for experimentation around different points of entry and exit to/from a(n) (artistic) event as it celebrates, acknowledges, and extends walking as an ethical mode of arrival. Read more

Saturday 20th April:

Name: Closing ceremony
Time: 21:00 - 23:00
Where: Rosendal Kafé
Curated by: Maryam Bagheri Nesami and Janaína Moraes

The library that ( ) folds is dismantled and gifted away for participants. Participants are invited to play with upcycling/recycling/exchanging the material residues of the week in a journey of re-location/shelving within the café.

Maryam Bagheri Nesami is an Iranian-born dance writer, curator and artistic researcher, a mother, and a Doctor in Dance Studies, living as a migrant in Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, since 2015. She has conducted and completed a number of post-doctoral projects with/through the method of practice-led research/ creative practice research. Her practice has built a body of scholarly research that looks at performing arts within the contexts of exile, migration, reparative strategies, strategies of resistance, equity, inclusion, decolonisation, social justice and human rights, through the embodied and artful methods. She has been appointed Professor of Artistic Research at the Theatre Academy of the Uniarts Helsinki.

Janaína Moraes is a Brazilian artist based in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Janaína’s work navigates between dance, language, performance, pedagogy and research as entangled/expanded art forms. Focused in an invitation poétics, she proposes choreography as events that create temporary containers for togethering. Currently a PhD Candidate at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland), Art Residencies Coordinator at Movement Art Practice – MAP and Artist Director at Tiny Fest in Ōtautahi (Christchurch).