Sascha Paar: Glorious Soil – Performance

Sascha Paar: Glorious Soil – Performance

The performance Glorious Soil will be presented three times at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, each time on the hour.

A person runs on a treadmill. Beside them lies a pile of soil. The movement begins and repeats without carrying the body forward. The person remains in motion while staying in the same place. Interruptions and shifts occur between the running movements before the person returns to the rhythm of the treadmill.

The treadmill represents a form of labour in which movement does not necessarily mean progress. The body adopts a rhythm, maintains it and yet must keep going. French choreographer and theorist André Lepecki has described how movement can also follow a social imperative: to remain active, to keep moving, never to stand still. From the perspective of embodied labour, we can also ask how work becomes inscribed in the body – in its movements, rhythms and capacity to endure physical strain. Glorious Soil brings these two perspectives together in a concrete physical situation.

Sascha Paar connects this situation with the industrial heritage of his hometown. Growing up in Bruck an der Mur as the son of a factory worker, he is familiar with a working environment whose rhythms have shaped life beyond the factory for generations. The iron and steel industries, as well as the paper and pulp industries, have shaped not only Styria's landscapes and workplaces but also people's understanding of time, reliability and performance. Shift work structured everyday life into morning, evening and night shifts; working hours and leisure time, weekdays and weekends followed a predetermined rhythm. In Glorious Soil, this experience of labour and deeply ingrained working rhythms is connected to questions of place and origin.

This industrial order is changing. With it, jobs, regions and ways of life are changing too. Yet the expectation to keep moving, remain active and stay productive has not disappeared. It has simply taken on different forms. Glorious Soil captures this contradiction in a simple situation: a body moves, pauses, starts again and remains in the same place.

Date: 3 December 2026, 6 pm

Venue: HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, Burgring 2, 8010 Graz

No advance registration is required and admission is free!

Public transport: Tram lines 1 and 7, bus lines 30, 31 and 39, stop: Oper / Kaiser-Josef-Platz