janessa clark

Providential Stranger (2025)

Providential Stranger is an environment for encounters, weaving threads of collective shame, rage, joy, and ecstasy. Without rituals of recollection can a community ever form a cohesive sense of identity? The work scrambles the visual archive with the aural, the spoken with the tactile, retrieval with decomposition. Drawing inspiration from the work of Sophie Calle, Hervé Guibert, and a host of anonymous authors, a providential stanger guides visitors through an ever-evolving space that acts as an extended archive and a mirror in which to etch our reflections.

Choreography & Concept Janessa Clark

Created and performed in collaboration with Alexandra Beller

Set Design by Janessa Clark

Music by Victoria Keddie

Providential Stranger was developed, in part, through a 2025 residency at Moulin/Belle in Mareuil en Perigord, France. It has also received funding and preview support through Amanda + James, in Brooklyn.

Music credits: Interstitial Transmission 1 and 2 by Victoria Keddie from the album Apsides, Chaikin Records, 2020. Prelude to Blue, by Victoria Keddie, originally composed for MERKI by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir & Daniel Leeb, Earth Homing; Reinventing Turf Houses, Grotta island, Reykjavik, Iceland,  8 August – 9 September 2018. All music used with permission.