Philip Ewe's practice encompasses live performance, film and installation, exploring the comedic figure of the fool or trickster, whose slippery character undermines power structures and reflects the absurdities of life. He crafts projects often in public (and not-so-public) spaces, channelling the rapidly redeveloping city and its attendant mental states. His live performances, which combine scripted text and improvisation, draw on the process of socialization — the voices and messages involved in the internalization of social norms and ideologies. Using his voice, choreographed and everyday movements, props, lighting and sound effects, Ewe merges the conditions of the city and the conditions of the self, rematerializing them in a live zone of collective expulsion and catharsis with an audience.
Laced with jeopardy, the scenarios and characters that drive his work emerge from psychotherapy, mass media, surveillance, the scrolling digital world of "content", and slapstick, motored by the frictions and paradoxes produced through the dissimilar voices he draws on — ranging from personal confession to motivational self-help — and underpinned by a queer, camp sensibility. Amid a current political climate of misinformation and fraudulent rhetoric, the scope of this research is far-reaching and urgent: how the forces of capitalism find their way into our bodies and our internal monologues.
The city is both a collaborator and Ewe's artistic material: a living organism that we not only move through but that moves us. Much like the Situationists of the 1950s or the '90s rave scene, he uses deindustrializing zones of the city to draw audiences to marginal, meanwhile and transitioning sites, testing the legal limits of land use and congregation. Echoing his interest in marginal locations, his work veers between extreme emotional states that lie on the outskirts of a socialized "norm": composure to hysteria, hypervigilance to introspection, mania to exhaustion, buffoonery to melancholy.