Visual artist, facilitator, writer, and performer Rasmus Raphaëlle Östebro cultivates, on multidimensional levels, an array of artistic expressions, and manifestations, such as sculpture, video, photography, choreography, performance, costume styling, interior design, installation, text, audio, scent - as well as energetic, and spiritual guidance for expansion, and integration, including energy work, breathwork, and sacred space holding. By existing symbiotically, these varied originative languages converse with one another and are often consolidated in conceptualisations that manifest through spatial stagings and narratives that surrounds, contextualises, and interconnect physical, conceptual, and ephemeral elements with each other.
An aspiration in Östebros’ practice is to create spaces, spheres, and offerings that encourage its participants to expand their awareness and surrender before the temporality of the moment. This invitation derives, in particular, from the artists’ devotion to, and elaborations on the contrasting and multifaceted topic of presence. By combining a variety of sense stimulating manifestations and methods, with a possible activation through live-based expressions - implicated by a performer’s presence awareness and presence control, Östebros’ work is gracefully balancing between vulnerable and prerogative positions, while placing the participator in some sort of shared spotlight - emphasising the relation between a human subject, its internal surroundings, and external reflections.
Traces of issues relating to identity construction, social power relations, spirituality, and utopian discourses are far from seldom to be disclosed and discerned in Östebros’ work. The practically theoretical implementation and (con)figuration, which is genuinely polyphonic in voice and vision, emerges from a place of uncompromisable authenticity and holds an empathetic, yet rebellious gaze - and is seductively transgressing borders, while moving fluidly between contexts and niches, such as visual art, performance art, performing arts, and holistic healing modalities - and has, in essence, an interdisciplinary approach in its core.
Repeatedly characterised by abstracted strategies originating from drag, the works of Östebro frequently exhibit a grave, but playful attitude to the notion of the real, which typically is enhanced by merging elements of fiction and documentary in narrations and situations. Recurring is the emotionally influenced idea and motif of the stage as a physical residence, sacred space, and spiritual hideaway - where the stage has been and remains as a prospect for something else; a remedy, a splinter, a rift where intuitive fantasies and longings have the opportunity to arise, persist and softly begin to integrate with other dimensions.
Rasmus Raphaëlle has gone through training with Yellow Galactic Sun (DK), and further studied at Konstfack - University College of Arts Crafts and Design (SE), Bergen Academy of Art and Design (NO), Stockholm University of the Arts/DOCH (SE), Gothenburg School of Art (SE), and The Swedish National Ballet School (SE).
© Rasmus Raphaëlle Östebro 2011-2022