RITUALS OF COLLECTIVE DESCENT

Anso Vela (Copenhagen), Jac Fabian (Copenhagen), Max (Copenhagen), Axel-Camilla (Oslo)

Playing Times: Friday 11:00 – 21:00 / Saturday 11:00 – 21:00

Location: Lichtkeller (Kachelhaus, basement)

RITUALS OF COLLECTIVE DESCENT bring together BDSM, artistic practice, facilitated interaction and responsive technology in one integrated architecture. 

The work unfolds in progressive zones, each zone mirrors a human impulse such as desire, excess, shame, control, surrender, and returns it as embodied consequence and presence. Collective suffering, consciously entered and carefully held, becomes a rehearsal of descent. Spiritually, this confronts the illusion that growth is comfortable.

Scenography, live sound and responsive algorithms form a feedback matrix: bodies alter light, projection and pulse; the environment modulates bodies in return. Intensity becomes visible. Rhythm becomes spatial. Pain becomes collective. Passage is marked on the skin. Marks remain. Confessions are written and archived. The room holds what takes place, folding each action into the next to form an eternal now, as the installation extends through the bodies moving across Xplore.

Anso Vela’s (she/her) current artistic work develops spaces where power, intimacy and desire can be explored with awareness and intention. She creates immersive formats that function as laboratories for surrender, authority, trust and responsibility, engaging BDSM as both artistic language and relational inquiry.
Alongside this, her curatorial practice operates across larger cultural frameworks, shaping international collaborations and platforms that examine how art and culture can influence perception, contribute to structural change, and foster connectedness in a fragmented world.

Jac Fabian (he/him) is an experienced rope bondage and kink practitioner who’s been teaching and facilitating for more than a decade. His focus is the meeting point of perversion, power dynamics, aesthetics, group facilitation and co-creation processes, artistic experimentation, and consciousness. He is the founder and director of House of Play in Copenhagen, a collaborative and multidisciplinary venue bringing work with conscious sexuality, consent, bodywork, kink, rope, dance, and art together under one roof. He has performed in Tokyo, at The Danish Royal Theatre and many other kink and art venues.

Max (he/him) is an interactive artist with a PhD in interaction design. Through co-founding illutron Interactive Art Collective, Kinky Salon Copenhagen, and House of Play / The Playlab, he has been an active contributor to the artistic and activist scene (in CPH) at the intersection of sex-positivism and interactive art practices. His work explores how digital materials can mediate and transform social interaction by fostering spaces for playfulness, reflection and intimacy. He approaches this by either creating physical interactive art installations or organising spaces for groups of diverse people to be empowered to collaborate, knowledge-share, and co-create.

Axel-Camilla Barratt-Due is a sound artist, composer, and instrument builder. Their work explores the merging of old accordions, mechanically operated air and fluids, and DIY electronics into electro-mechanical instrument systems performed through live coding.

Axel-Camilla has worked as a composer for stage productions across Europe for more than 15 years. Their work has been presented at venues and festivals including the Royal Opera House, National Theatre, Black Box Theatre Oslo, Stamsund International Theatre Festival, MDT Stockholm, Insomnia Festival Tromsø, Nicolai Kunsthal Copenhagen, and the Bergen International Festival.

Axel-Camilla studied accordion at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and sound art at the Berlin University of the Arts (Universität der Künste), graduating in 2016. They are currently a research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music.