As technology continues to accelerate, Lagging Bodies makes space for lag, delay and the gap between body and machine. Rather than treating these frictions as something to fix, the programme approaches them as sites for resistance and imagination. It supports performance practices that challenge hyper-optimisation and polished digital aesthetics, foregrounding research, risk and process.

The first iteration, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, brings together practices that use myths, mysticism, ritual and magic as tools for navigating technology. Taking its title from Richard Brautigan’s poem, the programme looks at technology both as something to use and resist, while imagining alternative ways of living and relating to our increasingly digital environments.

Programme

Julie Goslinga — Sara

Sara (2025, 07:07) is a short film referring to an eponymous piece of audio porn posted by deleted_user13791722 on Freesound.com. Through Eve’s apple, male desire and the way linguistic intentions shift when sexualised, the film asks whether it is possible to be witnessed without being ruined.

For Lagging Bodies, the film is activated through a live performance. Moving between speech, instruction, narration and vocal presence, the performer guides the audience through the work, extending its exploration of desire, language and witnessing into a live encounter.

Julie Goslinga (NL) is a 3D artist, designer and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Her work explores the edges of the human, Otherness and what it might mean to be humane.

Ginevra Petrozzi & Ines Borovac — Protocols of Gratitude

Protocols of Gratitude is a performance dedicated to the machines of Nxt Museum. Inspired by rituals of gratitude towards tools like the Japanese practice of kiyoharai (清祓), the blessing of machines with holy water in the Orthodox and Catholic Church, or the Hindu festivity of Vishwakarma Puja, Ginevra Petrozzi and Ines Borovac develop a protocol of gratitude for the museum’s technological infrastructure that sustain its livelihood and that of the artists that inhabit it.  

Through voice, gesture, sound and offerings, the artists invite the audience to witness and join in thanking and honouring the machines, making their labour visible. For the duration of the ceremony, the museum’s technology shifts from something to be used, into the protagonist.

Ginevra Petrozzi (IT) explores magical thinking, mysticism and the occult in relation to AI and contemporary techno-politics. Ines Borovac (CRO) investigates how traditional and digital systems of power become encoded onto marginalised bodies. Both artists are based in the Netherlands.

Lucia Fernandez Santoro & Agustín Martínez Caram — HYMN

HYMN (2026) is a performance drawing on mythological female figures living in water, and the projections of power, desire and expectation that gather around them. 

Through sustained movement and physical exhaustion, Lucia Fernandez Santoro explores how femme bodies are mythologised, disciplined and desired and how fatigue, frustration and cliché can become ways of resisting fixed expectations and making space to exist on our own terms, as a mermaid leaves the water and chooses her own ending.

Developed in collaboration with audiovisual composer Agustín Martínez Caram, HYMN extends this exploration through an audiovisual environment that gradually shifts from apparent stability toward dissolution. Sound, light and image accumulate, fracture and recede with and around the performer, treating presence as something that alters the conditions of the space. What remains is a residue: an afterimage of the encounter, of hope and of resistance.

Lucia Fernandez Santoro (AR/FR) is a performance artist working across installation and live performance. She explores how fiction, whimsy and beauty can mobilise affective tropes and prompt the imagination to subvert social codes.

Agustín Martínez Caram (AR/NL) is an artist-researcher and audiovisual composer exploring how scientific and computational systems shape perception, agency and collective life.

Practical information

Friday, 20 November 2026

Lagging Bodies: All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace18:30–19:30

Saturday, 21 November & Sunday, 22 November 2026

Operator — Human Unreadable

Programme and times to be announced.

Event format: Performance programme

Part of: Amsterdam Art Week 2026

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