Borrowed Landscape consists of a series of location-inspired performances set in diverse private and public spaces. Previous editions have taken place in an office, a shopping mall, a neighbourhood supermarket and a model house. The title of this project is derived from the Japanese term “shakkei”. It refers to the technique used in Japanese traditional garden design of integrating the surrounding existing landscape into the composition of a garden. This approach is reflected in the unique way in which Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki bring together different realities in the specific urban sites they aim to investigate.

In Borrowed Landscape, the performers and the performance blend into common everyday spaces while, by slightly subverting them, simultaneously making them unfamiliar. The (accidental) audience is thus made to see and experience these ordinary spaces differently and encouraged to rethink the notion of everyday life itself.

Avdal and Shinozaki’s inventive and often humorous interactions with the chosen locations, their slightly exaggerated movements or incongruous actions and the surprising soundscape developed by long-time collaborator Fabrice Moinet, insert poetry into those spaces that define our personal and professional lives. At the same time, the hybrid realities created in this way invite the audience to take a step back and look again, to interact differently with these all too common surroundings. In the process, these alluring performances reveal our routines, make us conscious of how the spaces we use every day are constructed, and of how we move and are made to move through them.