Alexandra Pirici (RO) brings the ongoing action Leaking Territories (2017) to London for the first time as part of Block Universe, London’s leading international performance art festival and commissioning body. Originally made for the decennial art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster / Munster Sculpture Projects 2017, the work took as its point of departure the historic town hall’s ‘Friedensaal’, where the Westphalian Peace Treaty was signed in 1684, marking the beginning of diplomatic solutions to large-scale conflicts and introducing key concepts for modern international law, such as state sovereignty. Shown now on the top floor of the Imperial War Museum, ‘Leaking Territories’ rethinks the very concept of territory in relation to place but also to bodies, identities and flux. It remediates existing political world events and objects with live bodies, imagines new ones – such as a human Google search engine – conjuring and linking together actions from different times and spatial realities, revealing the concept of a well delimited, well enclosed horizontal territory and stable identity as a fiction.
