Maja Hannisdal // Cloaca Maxima

In Cloaca Maxima you are invited down into a seemingly infinite, sub-level-sewage universe. Down here, beneath our everyday lives, the excess of our consumerism - both material and psychological - gathers a living fatberg, threatening to collapse our comfort. In the sewer, a two headed creature is bubbling and oozing. A new eerie and potentially threatening intelligence is evolving, feeding on latent memories, nostalgia, trash glamour and the delicious fat from the world above. 

The world's biggest fatberg was discovered in 2017 under Whitechapel Road in the sewers of London. The colossal fatberg weighed in at a staggering 130 tons, and was the size of 20 elephants consisting mainly of cooking fat and wet wipes. This startling discovery sets the tone for the greasy glow of the Cloaca underworld. In this performance both physical and psychological over consumption is in focus. Could there be a “psychological sewer” where the excess of our constant information flow is stored and creates trouble? 

Cloaca Maxima is a performance by Maja Hannisdal and Natalie Price Hafslund with original music by Guoste Tamulynaite. Hannisdal and Price Hafslund experiment on a knife's edge between fascination and critique, exploring over-consumption of information, value systems and their beauty ideals.  

Named after one of the world's earliest sewer systems in Rome, presided over by deities Cloacina and Venus, Cloaca Maxima contemplates what might happen where the seemingly unwanted collects and begins to swirl…