1986, in Zurich (Switzerland)

PRICE (Mathias Ringgenberg, 1986, Rio de Janeiro, RJ)  is a fictional character who appears in various performances. His work is characterized by elaborate soundscapes, costumes and stage design often developed in collaborative constellations. His productions play with the audience’s expectations of the exposed, ostensibly authentic self of the performer, who emotes before their eyes. They are interspersed with pop-cultural set pieces, mechanical sounds, rhythms and his own singing voice. The voice forms a central element of his work. PRICE views it as an acoustic form of emotional communication outside language’s imperative to create meaning. In PRICE’s work, different spaces—each with their own economies, mechanisms of historization and exclusion, norms and potentials—overlap: the stage of theater and performance, the club, digital space, the fashion runway, the exhibition space. The drama known as PRICE unfolds against the backdrop of spaces divided into their individual, constituent parts. His performances alternate between total immersion and the abrupt unmasking of the means of theatrical staging. Part of this involves the emotional work that has to be invested in order to maintain the fiction of the performer’s individual identity. PRICE is interested in the conflicting relationship between these socially normative categories, the realm of which is the (queer) self, the (queer) body. For him, failure is always also part of a queer strategy: an indifference to assimilation, rigid identities and the demands on the self in digital capitalism. It is a second-degree failure that is always part of the presentation. Performances, inter alia, at Swiss Dance Days 2019, Kunsthalle Basel, 1.1 Space for Zeitgeist, Dampfzentrale and Stadtgalerie Bern; Helmhaus, Tanzhaus, Kunsthalle Zürich, KARMA, Bar3000, Cabaret Voltaire Zürich; Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Center and Le Bourg, Les Urbaines Festival Lausanne; Centre for Contemporary Art and KEM Warsaw; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Le Commun, Geneva; Vrankrijk, FLAM Festival Amsterdam; Beursschouwburg, Performatik festival, Batard festival, Rosa Brux, Brussels; STUK – House for Dance, Image & Sound, Leuven; MAD House Helsinki; Human Resources, NAVEL, and PAM Los Angeles; MDT Stockholm, mumok within ImPulsTanz Vienna and Galpão Bela Maré, Rio de Janeiro. The artist ’s participation in Pivô Research 2022 is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia South America. @pricepriceprice