live PERFORMANCE / INSTALLATION / FILM
Collaboration with Coby Sey
2020 - 2023

A Tender Ascent is an immersive performance work that seeks to unsettle normative hierarchies through an ethic of radical tenderness and co-sentient collaboration. Engaging with expanded notions of synaesthesia, the piece investigates the interrelationality of perception—where sensation, affect, and cognition blur the boundaries between what is seen, felt, heard, and intuited.

Through the convergence of live performance, 6.1 surround sound, and real-time projection, the work becomes a site for attuning to the vibrational, emotional, and energetic exchanges that unfold in the shared presence of two sentient bodies. The artists examine how frequency might become movement, how gesture might resonate as sound, and how image may reverberate as somatic sensation.

Positioned as a live, audio-visual field of encounter, A Tender Ascent proposes an experiential suspension of spatial and temporal certainties—a liminal terrain in which affect, vibration, and embodied presence generate new modes of sensing, relating, and being-with.

Read Tank Magazine interview here

A Tender Ascent represents the culmination of work begun during Wysing’s ‘Broadcasting’ in 2020, when Berthelot and Sey were in-residence at Wysing as part of the programme for Wysing Polyphonic: The Ungoverned (curated by A---Z). 

A Tender Ascent is supported by Arts Council England and Fluxus Art Projects.
Exhibition curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield 

Presented in partnership with The Wire Magazine, Tank Magazine and Noods Radio