UPROAR is an immersive performance which summons the highly relevant figure of the Chimera as an expressive embodiment, expanding the horizon of what it means to be plural. With numerous responsibilities, fantasies and realities all at once, antiquitie’s Chimeric figure – part lion, part goat, part snake – celebrates the value and gathering of three or more.

Together with their collaborators, Simone Aughterlony and Michael Günzburger take pleasure in the erotics and recognition of distinct parts alongside the irrefutable combination of complex organisms.

Sound propagation materials shaped into impressive architectural structures form an enclosure for the imagination of a creature to come. Taken apart, the movement of these ‘wall figures’ transition from an enclosure to an expanded and flexible space. In this sense, a process of dismantling what was previously an enclosure gives permission for any number of spatial chimeric proposals or mirage-like sightings to take shape. The question of positionality and perspective is renegotiated as the performers navigate feelings of bewilderment and awe. UPROAR is the turmoil. The impossible is not opposed to the real, the impossible composes with the real and promises a trans*futurism of the wildly imaginative.

Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance, performance and visual art contexts.
They have been devising queer-spirited choreographic works over the last eighteen years. Engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside their process, new constellations emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that foster both familiar and unknown quantities. Simone’s works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Aughterlony approaches art making as a world building practice where they navigate the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements. As a performer they have worked with artists such as Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and Forced Entertainment amongst others.
In recent years the works Biofiction, Uni * Form (co-authored with filmmaker Jorge León) and the collaborative project, Everything Fits In The Room with artist Jen Rosenblit, a commission from HAU Hebbel am Ufer and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, have toured extensively. These works were presented at the 2018 Venice Biennale Teatro for an invited artist focus. Remaining Strangers, an interactive work that interrogates the guest/host relation concludes their research into conceptions of the stranger of which Compass and Maintaining Stranger are an integral part.
Simone has received the KFV funding – a cooperative funding body from the city and canton of Zürich, as well as Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council between the years 2006 to 2020. They were recipient of the city of Zürich recognition prize in 2011 and the prize recipient from the Federal Office of Culture in 2015 as well as The Kuiltur preis for. Kanton Zürich in 2023. They regularly teach at academic institutions such as ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts and Manufacture in Lausanne, DAS Art Amsterdam amongst others as well devising and facilitating laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge. In 2020 together with Marc Streit, they founded Imbricated Real, an independent structure for contemporary art practice.

Michael Günzburger (*1974, lives in Zurich) and pursues a playful research, publication, exhibition and studio practice. The production processes of drawings and prints with their collaborative forms, materials and research formats has become the focus of his work. He has a long-standing practice in making art in collaborations with personsfrom crafts and sciences as a critical, and foremost social practice.
How things come together, stay together and dissolve again is a driving force behind his work, connecting his PhD Thesis on Chimera with Prof. Florian Dombois and the Author Julia Weber and the research Projects Hands-on Documentation of Artistic-Technical Processes in Print he conceived in Collaboration with Prof. Christoph Schenker and Mara Züst at the Zurich University of the Arts. His multi-faceted materials are exhibited in galleries, museums, art spaces and public places in Switzerland as well as abroad. Günzburger has received several awards, including the Recognition Prize of the Foundation for Graphic Arts in Switzerland, the Monograph Prize of the Canton of Bern, as well as travel and research grants to India by the Swiss Arts Council.
Since 2012, the artist has published several monographs besides exhibition catalogs: among them Plots (2012), with recipes by Raphael Urweider, and Contact (2018), in collaboration with Lukas Bärfuss, both published by
Edition Patrick Frey.