N.Lichtig & N.Canal, DRAGON FILES, performance (electric guitar, chains, amplifier, fieldrecording, prepared slides), variable length 2024 — ongoing

DRAGON  FILES is a performance that merges elemental forces, archival echoes, and sonic disruptions in an immersive and unpredictable environment. The dragon, an ever-shifting mythical entity, embodies the uncontrolled forces of nature, history, and imagination, while the files function as collected traces—fragments of voices, whispered evidence of memory in flux. These layers of sound, text, and image create a performance that channels transformation, temporality, and impermanence.

Electric guitar, field recordings, and prepared slides interweave to create a space where distorted noise collides with organic resonance. The dragon is both a force of chaos and a vessel of transmission, drawing from the voices that resonate through history, language, and artistic practice. This work does not pursue resolution but instead embraces contradiction, erosion, and reconstruction—where presence and absence continually redefine one another.

 

Nina Canal and Nadia Lichtig, both deeply rooted in experimental sound and visual arts, converge in this performance as a dialogue between gestures, memory, and sound matter. Canal’s extensive collaborations with avant-garde musicians and Lichtig’s presence in international exhibition circuits enrich the ever-morphing landscape of DRAGON FILES, ensuring that each experience is unique—an unfolding, an unraveling, an emergence from the interplay of voices and reverberations.

 

About Nina Canal

Musician, Painter, Energy-Artist

Since the late 1970s, Nina Canal has worked across three disciplines: music, painting, and the Chinese Internal Arts of TaiChiChuan, HsingY’I Chuan, and Qigong. A native of Cape Town, South Africa, she moved to London at age six and later studied Fine Art at Hornsey College of Art.

After graduating, Nina relocated to New York City, where she became an integral part of the avant-garde downtown Manhattan post-punk music, art, and film scene. She played guitar with the Gynecologists, recorded with Dark Day, and collaborated with Rhys Chatham. In 1978, she co-founded Ut, an influential rock trio known for its raw and exploratory sound.

Since then, Nina has continued to compose and perform, collaborating with Rhys Chatham and Ut, participating in experimental music projects, and composing for conceptual performance pieces such as Pierre Bal Blanc’s 2022 commission in the Czech Republic.

 

About Nadia Lichtig
Multidisciplinary Artist and Researcher
Nadia Lichtig is a German-born artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound art. Based in Montpellier, France, her work explores the relationships between voice, memory, and materiality. Lichtig studied linguistics and fine arts, and her artistic approach is deeply influenced by her interest in history, literature, and sonic experimentation.

Her projects often involve archival materials, ghostly traces, and fragmented narratives, creating immersive experiences where sound and image interact in fluid, unpredictable ways. Lichtig has exhibited her work internationally and collaborated with musicians and visual artists, continuously questioning the boundaries between text, sound, and presence.
As a professor of Fine Arts, Lichtig integrates her research into her teaching, investigating how memory and perception shape artistic expression. Through her diverse body of work, she continues to challenge conventional artistic forms, opening new pathways between the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard.

2024 in : La République (cynique), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (F)

https://palaisdetokyo.com/exposition/la-republique-cynique/