last footprint: kind of 30 august 2025
PHOTO: NATASCHA ZANDER
A performance within an installation, somewhere between a garden, a hospital, and a graveyard. Two young people interweave their families’ lives. Within an archive of personal documents collected over the years, they navigate the landscape of loss.
In a last portrait, two young people unearth autobiographical fragments and affecting vignettes, carrying their families’ lives in Singapore and Germany into the same space. Inherited and borrowed artefacts rest in various opacities. Weaving together text, sound, dance, and visual poetry, this work braids connections between botany and illness, labour and care, tradition and regeneration.
For 32 years, Domenik's grandparents took care of a large garden in Weimar. The garden chronicles their lives through the seasons - through processes of preparing, planting, caring, harvesting, and preserving. The garden is a place of cyclicality: of (no) death and (no) birth, of continuation and change. Domenik’s grandfather passed away on 31 August 2024, a month after he saw the first iteration of this work in Amsterdam.
Ashley’s father was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson's disease at the age of 40. This neurodegenerative disease is a rhythm of ageing that is non-linear and fast-forwarded, characterised by medicine-induced waves of “ON” and “OFF” every few hours. The family has been caring for him for the past 19 years, collectively experiencing these cycles. For Ashley, who grew up as a caregiver, this role has been slipping away since they left Singapore 6 years ago.
Each time they enter the work, ashleyho+domeniknaue challenge the medium of performance to hold a grieving space. Throughout its iterations, last portrait is an intimate document-in-becoming.
makers’ note:
In the past years, our families have learned to see us as Documenters. They are beginning to offer us stories and artefacts in pieces, sometimes subtly and sometimes more explicitly asking for them to be transformed in our work. last portrait is our response to these wishes. Perhaps this is how we can love, over distance. Perhaps a different perspective is what this distance offers.
PHOTO: ARDY CAHYO
Concept, performance, sound & visual design: ashleyho+domeniknaue
Scenography in dialogue with Lena Michel van Drie and Pam Sikkink
Dramaturgy: Elowise Vandenbroecke
Styling: Cain Cara Insa Wittenhaus
Technical and lighting support: Edwin van Steenbergen
Production & PR: Dansateliers
Artistic guidance: Simone Hogendijk and Gabriel Pietro Marullo
Thank you roelroel and Gary Shepherd for the sound support
Co-production: Dansateliers, SPRING Festival, Over het IJ
In collaboration with: Oriente Occidente, Dance Nucleus, Studio Plesungan
Financed by: Asia-Europe Foundation, Fund Performing Arts NL, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, Janivo Stichting, Van der Ende Foundation
PHOTOS BY MOON SARIS, NATASCHA ZANDER, MONIA PAVONI, ROGAN YEOH, ARDY CAHYO
HANDOUT, DESIGNED BY HO YUHAN ASHLEY
AVAILABLE ON-SITE
A3 RISOGRAPH PRINTED AT TERRY BLEU (AMSTERDAM)
reviews and other words
by Rick Yamakawa, published on artscape (Japan)
translated by Mitsue Kitagawa
proofread by Erika Dreskler
The original Japanese text was written in Nov 2024.
"After I have witnessed the narratives, am I the same person? What kind of temporal and spatial path have I been through? One could say that it is the “stage” that poses this question, and that we begin to answer it only after leaving the venue, or perhaps even before we arrive. [...] The time and space of the performance last portrait, reveal that our past is very much still here before us, while also pointing to the possibility that it still exists, somewhere, somehow, out there.
[...]
Even if the objects arranged on the “stage” remain the same, the narratives surrounding each object refuse to let go of the two of them. From the outside, they appear like a knot, but at the same time, they stand in a place where they can observe the expanding narratives around them. In the end, perhaps it has always been a story that returns to Ashley and Domenik’s bodies, but perhaps something similar could have happened to me—or might still happen in the near future.
It might be just that I haven’t remembered yet."
by XUE, Singaporean artist, founder of
Singapore Butoh Collective
“Ashley and Domenik unearthed autobiographical fragments and gut-wrenching vignettes, grappling with themes of loss and grief. For an hour, the duo tended to their garden with an earnestness and intensity that feels increasingly rare in a landscape where performances often manifest as highly stylized affectations. [...] Ashley and Domenik's intimacies dissolve these separations and reminds me that the origins of art lie beyond the polished facades of "professional" artistic creation.”
“Yesterday's experience of last portrait reminded me that the potency of live art stems from a true commitment to being. In order to activate the transformative potential of performance in oneself and all those involved, one can no longer remain half-open. Performance as a form cannot be opaque but translucent and porous, to allow for leakages between the hard axises of certainty.
What is precious and what is held in these temporalities is not always visible to the naked eye and the art is really in the reading 空気を読む (くうきをよむ, kuuki wo yomu) and the subsequent responding."
“the more time you take to walk through, read and hold these objects, the more the letters and things in the work take on new weight. last portrait was at once heartbreaking and firm.”
(Chew Shaw En, Singaporean artist)
“tender vessels tending layers of grief, the whole performance felt like a surprising and familiar prayer bound as a light book you sleep with on your heart”
(Salty Xi Jie Ng, Singaporean artist)
“a work that irreverently diassembles performance”
(Hee Suhui, Singaporean artist)
“Tranen bleven stromen”(Emel Koç)
“An exploration of how illness slowly moves us back (in)to the soil we came from. And how that affects our relationships with those we love the most. I haven't experienced this energy in quite awhile, glad to have seen it!”
(Rik Dijkhuizen, Dutch artist)
“Seeing just once is never enough for Ashley Ho and Domenik Naue's multi-dimensional performance. Besides seeing their live performance, the audience needs to go back to Ashley and Domenik's installation to discover more intimate surprises that took both of them months of intensive preparation. Every placement of the exhibit was designed to challenge how observant or how much care the audience put into the artists' creations. It could be in the forms of poetry, personal family objects/letters/photos/message threads, background sounds, music, films, printings, and even growing seedlings! All are part of the elements for their artistic creations.
[...]
After seeing Ashley and Domenik's various artistic works over the years, we truly enjoy contemporary arts now for its endless possibilities of connecting with people.”
(Ashley’s mother, contemporary art convert)
“I’m cold.” (Ashley’s father)