Studio photograph depicting a girl who arches on a wooden structure. She visually resembles the ancient Egyptian goddess Nut, who was portrayed as a woman stretched on the tips of her toes and fingers with a star-covered body. She embodied the heavens, protected the dead and was regarded as a barrier separating the forces of chaos from the ordered cosmos in the world. It is interesting that the man had always had the need to transpose the unfathomable vastness of the universe to the human scale.

The choreography is based on the so-called Chladni figures – a physical phenomenon discovered in late baroque. In the middle of the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace ballroom, an ob- ject made of special stands upon which these figures are to be manifested is being gradually formed. A group of players, mu- sicians, build individual layers of the object from the outer circumference toward the room’s center, from the lowest stands forming a kind of base up to the highest ones, and put the plates placed on top of the stands into vibration by drawing violin bows along the plates’ edges in a kind of orchestral mode, whereby fine flower dust spread on the plates forms regular figures that emerge and change depending on the plate’s size and shape, and the vibrations’ frequency. The last figure is created on the high stand placed under the monumental chandelier. The player must ascend a few steps to reach the plate and “play” the figure, visible only from above. A person on the balcony over whose shoulder we watch the scene is observing the whole event, while it is not defined whether he or she is involved, supervising, determining, or just present.

The video projection Beyond Control presents an ironic view on urban planning, reversing its rules in order to create a space for chance and unexpected solutions. The builder is blindfolded and is constructing a plan for a fictive city, the major sources for the construction being memory and intuition. The typical rationality and foreknowledge of urban planning is therefore left behind, together with the need for control. The structure arising is variable, irrational and unbound.