Nilas Dumstrei

Works for Live Art Danmark
2013 “Strømmed af ord” at Alt_Cph 13
2019 Co-Designer of Art-LARP “Mundane Heroics”
2021 “Life” at Live Art for Børn, Festuge Aalborg.

Strømmed af ord
The title of this very short performance might be translated as “Flooded by words”, but no words are spoken throughout it, although it is announced as a investigation of the origin of all those words that flow out of us in a permanent trance like stream.

We see Nilas drawing a couple of egg shapes onto the concrete floor of the venue with white chalk and, after contemplating them for a short while, swallow the chalk and wash it down with beer, leaving us thinking of the wolf in the fairy tale who ate chalk to sweeten his voice.

Mundane Heroics
Nilas was one of the organisers of this project by Live Art Denmark that combines Live Action Role Playing, performance art and sculpture in a participatory art work for young people. It brought together a group of young role players from Sweden, Denmark and Finland. They painted, remodeled and combined everyday household objects to become at once familiar and strange. Using the objects, they perform exaggerated versions of gestures derived from everyday tasks and become mundane heroes in a series of wordless tableaux in public space.

Life
In the guise of a promoters selling products for an imaginary company, Nilas and his two role player/performers approached passers by during our Live Art for Children festival for Ålborg Festuge in the summer of 2021. Equipped with ring binders, a roll up display and uniforms, the performers presented the people they met with a range of products which related to the ubiquitous presence of data in all strata of our reality. The characters in this life roleplay were presented as having a spiritual relation to the free flowing data as well as a commercial one. Participants could get involved on different levels. They tried our products, filled in surveys and engaged in conversation. They became players in a game that inspired them to reflect some of the weirder directions our data based society might be headed to.

About the Artist
Born in Roskilde, Denmark, in 1989 and a graduate from Funen Art Academy, Nilas is an interdisciplinary artist based in Denmark, mixing participatory performance with sculpture. Through an investigative practice he considers sociality in relation to feelings, group culture and language within their interrelating cohesion. One focus of Nilas’ work is facilitating and documenting participatory practices like role plaing and group play exercises.

Nilas’ website was unavailable at last check in on July 14, 2021. Here comes a link to some of his work on Live Action Role Plays on an appropriately weird website.