Eau De Colonisation- Floating University
Photo: Ulrich Kellermann
EAU DE COLONISATION 2025
CONCEPT CHOREOGRAPHY TEXT; CANDAS BAS
Performance with Thulane Lloyd Mgidi
This site-specific performance reclaims the myth of the Little Mermaid through a sharp, satirical monologue colliding fairy tale, migration politics, and capitalist exploitation. Performed by a “rebranded” mermaid who has survived her own myth, the piece unfolds as an absurd auction of bodily fragments and symbolic relics: mermaid kisses, Eau de Colonisation, a life jacket that arrived too late.
Set in or near water, the performer transforms the site into a liquid archive of colonial memory, environmental grief, lost migration routes, and the violence of commodification.
Blending stand-up, ritual, spoken word, and physical intensity, the work exposes how female, mythic, and migrant bodies are packaged, desired, and erased. The mermaid, equal parts tragic, hilarious, and uncomfortably lucid, invites the audience into an “auction house” where capitalism prices suffering, and applause becomes complicity.
The performance ends with a symbolic return of Eau de Colonisation to the water: an act of mourning, refusal, and reclaimed agency.
Humorous, biting, and unsettling, the work is created for liminal water spaces: lakes, canals, reservoirs, and urban ecological sites.
YOLLUK- KUnsthaus Bethanien
YOLLUK - THE LAST SIP
CONCEPT VIDEO PERFORMANCE CANDAS BAS
Video installation — part of the Rakı Series
Yolluk is the last sip of rakı poured for the road ahead, a ritual of departure, inheritance, and unresolved belonging.
In a 16-minute looping video, Candaş Baş moves with a rakı glass balanced across the body: in the hand, on the head, against the shoulder, grasped by the foot, carried through trembling shifts of weight. The glass becomes an extension of memory…fragile, persistent, impossible to drop.
The work traces how imagined freedom can turn into another form of pressure, how migration reshapes the body’s sense of safety, language, and home. Movement becomes both restraint and resilience: a choreography of shaking roots, dissonance, prejudice, and endurance.
Yolluk is a state, a looping threshold between beginnings and loss, between leaving and carrying.
A fragile archive of what is carried.
POLIGONAL & PLUMMO B10179
Performance in collaboration with Poligonal Berlin and Plummo in Baerenzwinger Berlin
BREATH 2024
CHOREOGRAPHY PERFORMANCE CANDAS BAS
Created inside Berlin’s former bear enclosure, this collaborative performance inhabits a space marked by captivity, display, and enforced limitation. Working with the architecture of the cage ; fur, stone, narrow ground, running water , Candaş Baş explores what it means to move inside confinement: physically, politically, psychologically.
The performance unfolds as part of an installation by Polygonal with a live polyphonic sound tapestry by Plummo. Distorted field recordings from the surrounding city merge with anecdotes from local voices, sonified social data, and statistics from the real estate industry — tracing urban transformation and capitalist extraction as an audible pressure.
Within this sonic environment, movement emerges as translation: a body responding to exploitation, enclosure, and the shrinking of space. Live vocals cut through the soundscape, turning the cage into an echo chamber of resistance, vulnerability, and survival.
A voice inside the enclosure.
SEREFE- KUIRXGAZINO-KUlTursommerfestival BERLIN-2023
SEREFE 2023
CONCEPT CHOREOGRAPHY MUSIC PERFORMANCE :CANDAS BAS
Interactive performance — part of the Rakı Series
Şerefe is an interactive performance honoring the Turkish gazino and rakı-table culture ; a ritual space where music, confession, humor, and politics intertwine.
The title means “to the honor.” In the tradition of the rakı table, those who gather swear to their honor that what is spoken there remains there. Intimacy becomes a contract. Listening becomes responsibility.
Inviting the audience into this fragile social ritual, Şerefe transforms performance into a shared table of trust, disclosure, and complicity where hospitality carries weight, and belonging is negotiated through voice, song, and silence.
A ritual of trust.
A performance of secrecy.
YOLLUK- CELEBRATING NEW WAVE FESTIVAL
KOMMUNALES KINO FREIBURG- 2023
YOLLUK 2023
CONCEPT CHOREOGRAPHY PERFORMANCE CANDAS BAS
Presented in a new interactive and performative form, Yolluk unfolds through text-based conversation, movement, and ritual presence. What began as a work rooted in migration shifts here into the present tense: a suspended state of in-betweenness, where belonging remains unstable and the body continues to remember.
Between self-realization and disorientation, intimacy and distance, Yolluk becomes a choreography of what is carried and what cannot be left behind.
A road ahead.
A glass still trembling.