Luminescence, stills from HD video, 2023
Luminescence is a video piece created and performed by the artists Julia Kouneski and Dannii Evans. Filmed at night in the bioluminescent waters of Laguna Manialtepec, outside Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, the artists hold lights in their hands as they engage in a slow contact dance with each other in the water. In an interplay between the dark night and waters and the illumination of the lights from their hands, the environment of the film appears both as water and as outer space. Engaging in this slow, gravity-less dance of sensing rather than seeing, the silhouettes of the artists´ bodies are at times recognizable, and at other moments blend into each other and the water, merging in swirls that resemble galaxies. Surrendering to being shaped by each other and the surrounding elements, the piece becomes a morphogenic process where human and cosmos merge— as above, so below.