Celestial Harmony

Performance, 2024
Hand-sewn silk and canvas costumes
Duration: 10–15 min
Performers: Selma Ranløv & Natalie Beier
Video: Mille Kalsmose

In Celestial Harmony, the audience is immersed in a ritualistic and sensory experience, where two performers mimic the works Cosmic Relations and Cosmic Family. Wearing hand-sewn silk and canvas costumes, they move through the crowd in slow, deliberate movements, as if pulled by a cosmic force.Their gestures are hesitant, blind, and intuitive—suggesting a way of sensing the world not through vision, but through presence. As philosopher Ole Fogh Kirkeby writes in an earlier collaboration, we must learn to “see with our fingertips.”

This tactile engagement with the world reflects a deeper connection between the self and the cosmos. It resonates with Cosmic Relations—where translucent, humanoid silhouettes orbit like guardian spirits above curved, planetary floor elements. These installations channel ancient cosmologies, referencing the Pythagorean concept of musica universalis—the belief that planetary orbits emit a harmonious sound beyond human hearing. In the performance, that silence becomes physical: breath, proximity, gravity.

As the performance unfolds, the humanoid silhouettes from Cosmic Relations are transformed into choreography. They kneel, not in submission, but in recognition—connecting the materiality of the human body with the abstract forces of the universe. Meteoric stones, planetary rings, and the sound of Saturn’s radio waves (captured by NASA’s Cassini mission) serve not merely as symbols, but as active participants in this cosmic ritual.

In this convergence, body and cosmos meet. The performance embodies Kirkeby’s idea of an emergent unity beyond dualism—where thought, sensation, language, and matter become one. In doing so, Celestial Harmony blurs the boundary between installation and action, between the individual and the infinite, between inner vibration and celestial resonance.