Building upon the solo piece AVA, which premiered in December 2024 at brut Wien, in which a lost voice was looking for connection, LOW unfolds in a landscape ravaged by exploitation, repression and decay. Three performers inhabit an installation in which the vestiges of industrial violence stick to surfaces and memories. This underwater wasteland is at the same time archive and oracle, a scar on earth insisting on being seen. To dive deep down in this case is a means not of escape but of encounter. LOW defies the logic of rulership and the amnesia of late capitalism. Karin Pauer does not aestheticise crisis, she moves right through it while tracing the brutal effects that deep-sea mining, seismic drilling and acoustic warfare have on ocean life. Within this debris, the performers – contentious, vulnerable and uncompromising – create a ritual of embodied protest. Rather than offering false comfort, LOW stays close to what is painful. For Karin Pauer, vulnerability is not a sign of defeat, but a place of radical resistance.

LOW is a choreography of absorption and entanglement, in which care is political, grief appears creative and the future seeps through the cracks. What does it mean to move with care within destruction?

LOW was created in collaboration with visual artist Eva Engelbert, musician Rozi Mákó, lighting designer Sveta Schwin and performers Hugo Le Brigand and Ixchel Mendoza Hernández.

LOW is part of Karin Pauer’s work cycle entitled practices for potential futures.

Karin Pauer is an Austrian performer/choreographer. She studied choreography at the ArtEZ Institute of Arts in Arnheim, the Netherlands, before starting an international career working with choreographers, filmmakers and visual artists such as Liquid Loft/Chris Haring, Davis Freeman, Mike O’Connor, Katrin Hornek and Maureen Kägi. Her own work been presented at ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier Wien, the Donaufestival, the Wiener Festwochen, Kunstforum Wien, the Secession, Belvedere 21 and others. The co-productions THE SCORE (2020), WE WERE NEVER ONE (2022), HOUSE OF CONSTRUCTS (with Aldo Giannotti, 2024) and AVA (2024) were created at brut Wien.