In the pandemic-stricken olive groves of Puglia, Southern Italy, two human bodies emerge from the trees for a dance of death.

The film is an artistic response to the rapid spread of the xylella fastidiosa bacteria in Southern Italy as a result of lacking biodiversity in the hundreds of years old monoculture olive groves. Over 60% of trees have been infected and are dying with no cure. Local olive farmers are deprived of their income basis.

PERFORMANCE Tizo All & Marc Philipp Gabriel

CHOREOGRAPHY Tizo All

MUSIC Marc Philipp Gabriel

CAMERA | EDITING Marc Philipp Gabriel

Marc Philipp Gabriel and Tizo All are Berlin based performance artists. Their dance film SALTO (2020) was selected for film festivals in Germany, USA, Greece, Colombia, Russia and Taiwan and won Best Ecoperformance Award 2022 at the 2nd Ecoperformance Festival in Sao Paulo.

Tizo’s artistic work is a place of collision, meeting the individual and the collective simultaneously in his performance-based practice. Beeing a queer BIPOC also reflects in his artistic practice and the wish for social justice. In this practice the body as such takes an important role in the creative process, without leaving aside other forms in which art can be translated and transported to the viewer, looking to touch the intangible. He is interested to move what is between space our body and the galaxy. 

Marc is working between body, voice, installation, video and architecture from the perspective of dance and movement. His work offers unconventional angles on social norms, contributing to the discourse of future models of how to be together on and with planet Earth. In 2019 he worked with the Portuguese dance company Dançando com a Diferença in the frame of his Pina Bausch Fellowship, during which the film SALTO was also born.