Black Mercedes

Black Mercedes is a new 5-hour solo performance by performance poet and writer Niko Hallikainen. The show is a spoken score for the televised funeral of Princess Diana from 1997, which serves as a portal into the unexplored ruins of the collective unconscious. Black Mercedes is a volcanic bathtub that is clogged by 10 kilos of smoky quartz. The performance visions the fall of the monarchy of rationality, which causes extreme sentimental waves, in which viewers are welcome to float or drown.

Black Mercedes deals with loss, heartbreaks, billionaires, emotional turbulence, psychic gardens, palaces, slums, hospitals, labyrinths, secret passageways, secret diaries, conspiracy, the European Union, tax havens, holiness, land and love. Niko uses nostalgia, intuition and suffering as magical practices that produce a subversive space for a new language of grief.

Niko Hallikainen is a performance poet, who makes text-based solo performances that disrupt borders between internal and external, individual and communal, pain and relief. Recurring qualities in Niko’s works are emotional hyperbola, alienation and the limits of language. The music featured in Black Mercedes is written by artist Carsten Nicolai under his alias Alva Noto.