Queer artist, who was born in Brazil and lives in Switzerland, Mathias Ringgenberg, aka PRICE [CH], explores identity, gender, and image issues in different choreographic and musical performances.

During his residency at Pivô [BR], he looked back on his previous work and experimented with the olfactory dimension within performance. PRICE continued the research he started with Niklaus Mettler at Palazzo Trevisan, in Venice, in which they investigated how to decompose symbol and language.

“Much of what I was creating in the last years revolved around an institutional critique. And around the idea of “deconstruction” or “queer in spaces”, which is defined by the removal of words, of language, allowing more space for my performance, a space to put melodies and improvisations and to see how all that can be translated into movement, but also into smell, which are the mediums I’m mostly focusing on,” he explains.

 

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For the open studio at Pivô, he created a glycerine installation with four different smells that compose the symbol of a rose. They are amidst chairs that form a repetitive architecture, a normative structure in contrast with the glycerine. Collaborating with two local musicians, the artist also had a sonic improvisation under the title «I Try My Tongue».

Deconstructing symbols, PRICE uses the notion of queer not only as identity, but as action, as a verb that destabilises and creates new structures.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

PRICE (Mathias Ringgenberg) is a fictional character who appears in various performances. His work is characterized by elaborate soundscapes, costumes and stage design often developed in collaborative constellations. His productions play with the audience’s expectations of the exposed, ostensibly authentic self of the performer, who emotes before their eyes. They are interspersed with pop-cultural set pieces, mechanical sounds, rhythms and his own singing voice. The voice forms a central element of his work. PRICE views it as an acoustic form of emotional communication outside language’s imperative to create meaning. In PRICE’s work, different spaces—each with their own economies, mechanisms of historization and exclusion, norms and potentials—overlap: the stage of theatre and performance, the club, digital space, the fashion runway, the exhibition space. The drama known as PRICE unfolds against the backdrop of spaces divided into their individual, constituent parts.