Project Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö, Sweden
Songs for the House of Returning
Performance: 6.3–22.3 2026
Ongoing performance – drop-in (booking recommended)
Price: Pay- what- you – want, from 80 SEK
Venue: Lilith Performance Studio, Bragegatan 15, Malmö
Opening hours: Thursday–Saturday: 18:00–21:00. Doors open 18.00.
Sunday: 15:00–18:00. Doors open 15.00
Artist Talk by Melati Suryodarmo
Venue: Skånes Dansteater: 20.3
Date: 20.3
Time: 12.00 -13.00.
The year at Lilith Performance Studio opens with one of Asia’s leading performance artists, Melati Suryodarmo. Her return is long anticipated.
In 2007, Suryodarmo created a large-scale performance in collaboration with Lilith Performance Studio, followed by a new work in 2016 – both of which have since been presented internationally.Now, ten years later, the time has come again.
In the new work at Lilith Performance Studio, Songs for the House of Returning, Melati Suryodarmo explores the growing distance between the human body and the natural systems that once structured collective life. Drawing on research into ancient temple sites across Indonesia, she approaches these structures not as historical monuments but as active spatial and sensory frameworks that propose alternative ways of inhabiting land, memory, and community.
The work considers the body as a “human temple”—a site where sensation, memory, and attention converge, and where perception becomes a form of listening. Through durational actions and the continuous construction and deconstruction of objects, the performance creates a shifting environment that evolves over time.
Live sound and music, performed by Singaporean musician and artist Yuen Chee Wai, constitute a central architectural element of the work, shaping its spatial and emotional dimensions.
Songs for the House of Returning unfolds over a total of 33 hours, presented in eleven cycles of three hours each, and brings together five dancers from Indonesia and Sweden. The work invites audiences to reflect on how embodied memory and sensory attention might reopen pathways of connection between body, land, and shared time.
Melati Suryodarmo is a central figure in contemporary performance art, with roots in butoh dance, conceptual performance, and Javanese philosophy.
She is known for her long-durational, often demanding works in which the body is used as an existential tool—a medium for presence, vulnerability, and resistance. With a background in dance and studies under Marina Abramović, she has developed a distinct artistic voice characterized by both rigorous concentration and poetic force.
In her work, Suryodarmo challenges the boundaries between ritual, art, and everyday life, creating works that invite the audience into states of heightened awareness. Her art revolves around questions of identity, memory, bodily energy, and cultural belonging, — often articulated with both a deeply personal and a universal resonance.
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