Amsnan / Pozderdam is a participatory performance that invites its audience on an imagined journey to Oland – a fictional country somewhere between Poland and Holland, whose name is itself a playful linguistic hybrid. Privately the performers communicate with each other in Olish, a language they have invented for the project. 

Both performers have a strong connection to Oland, yet find themselves lost in the city of Poznań, searching for traces that might lead them back. One of the devices they use to establish contact with Oland is a mirrored sphere, through which they attempt to access an imagined dimension.

During the walk, the participants and performers follow a series of traces and clues left by “O”, an enigmatic figure who may be a deity, a resident of Oland, or simply something with which communication is possible. Following the route indicated by O, the walkers encounter a series of clues: a telephone call from a street booth, hidden messages and other traces that gradually lead them to a point where they encounter a video recording of the performers attempting to make contact with Oland through the mirrored sphere. 

The search for O’s traces – including those embedded within the video – places the participants in a heightened state of attention, encouraging them to look for signs and signals appearing within the ordinary landscape of the city. Yet the performance never provides definitive evidence that Oland exists.

The performance is working between fiction and reality, play and belief, orientation and disorientation. It inhabits the uncertain territory of imagination, where the desire to find signs and answers can become a form of productive, almost absurd obsession.

The performance was a result of an art residency Annefleur Schep was invited to in Poznań as an ambassador of IOOTCP – Institute for Unconventional Research of the Language and Culture of Poland.