“Have you ever spent more than 2 minutes in front of a work of art and ... tried to dance it?”: starting from this question, Elena Boillat – an independent artiste active in the performing arts as a multifaceted interpreter and creator – questions herself about the combination of observation, relationship and emotion, the mechanisms underlying the perceptive vision of a work of art and how they influence the condition of a human body placed in front of it.

Mimesis is an empathic act between two people, the performer and the spectator – who also becomes a creator – to live a shared experience that is possible wherever there is a work of art to be looked at.
This work was born as a Mediation in Dance project, the winner of a competition promoted by DECS and Reso – the Swiss Dance Network in 2017, and created specifically for museums and exhibition spaces.
During the Swiss national tour for the Tanz Fest 2019, this project was hosted not only in museums, but also in rooms outside of museums and in alternative cultural spaces, where Elena Boillat decided to use works by independent local artists, thus creating new approaches to collaboration and contamination between idioms and crafts.
Mimesis is therefore an experience in which the work of art becomes the intermediary, while at the same time becoming itself the subject matter of mediation and possible new inspirations.

“The greatest urgency for creating a project of this kind”, says Elena Boillat, “arose from the need to reappropriate time: I often visit museums, and I have noticed that most of us spend less than two minutes in front of any work of art. That’s why I wanted to create a space within a space, where you can stay in touch with your perception for a few minutes longer, looking with your eyes, but also with the rest of your body.
With the one-to-one performance I also wish to draw attention to the reversal of roles where the spectator becomes the creator and the performer their guide and inevitably their audience as well. Whether it's inside a museum or in another space, I want to perform an empathic act through a shared experience.
Thanks to a relationship of trust, spectators let themselves be guided in their bodily and sensory observation of the work of art, becoming the creator of intimate and personal movements: even a mere flip of the wrist, opening and moving one’s arms, or swaying on the spot is in fact dancing, precisely because it is done by the body.”