Julie C. Stamm
Julie C. Stamm

Is this Summer?

~ 10 min Performance
Living room (The Apartment Vol. 2)
Immersive room (Manifold Exhibition)
Public Space (Stadtaktion EnsembleX)

London, 2023 & NRW 2026

in collaboration with Lia Bergman

Trailer from the Manifold Performance, footage by Rafa Roeder and The immersive Room 

The piece talks about perpetually getting lost in world-building without the intention to stay; negotiating spaces for a shared ground. Two performers play Jenga blindfolded. Their bodies function as surfaces, disruptions and catalysts of transient structures. The audience is invited to wander around this performance which is both sculpture-like in its architecture and organic in its growth upwards. Hence, the audience becomes a dynamic resonating ambient. 

Julie C. Stamm

Concept & Evolution  

Before the residency at Goldsmiths in 2024, Lia gave me a call if we wanted to work together on a piece for our friends' exhibition in their apartment "to interrogate that which hits closest to home". We got chatting about blind Jenga in the living room.

During the residency we played many rounds of blind Jenga in the hatchlabs and thought about the notions of building blocks in computation, lego; practiced to build palaces between us and got into fights and giggles every time it failed.

After the apartment shows we wondered how this piece could live outside the living room, specifically in the Hatcham Church's immersive room, a contrasting sterile environment. Together with Ashish roy we developed a Touch Designer patch to play around with lights and invited the audience to vertex around us as we ascended during the piece.

Some time after, in January 2026, I choreographed an intervention in public space for ensembleX in Witten as part of an awareness campaign for the Saalbau (the local theatre). Lia and I performed the piece in 3 locations in public space on a snowy Saturday. 

Julie C. Stamm