Études is a multidisciplinary project that began during a residency at XENIA artist retreat in England in July 2025. It consists of four études: ISOLATION, DUCK, AIM, and RUN — each exploring a different dimension of conflict, and a fifth chapter, WONDER. The project emerged through practical tasks and experiments that gradually became independent artistic works. Together, the études reflect the experience of creating under the weight of war, while exploring the tension between the basic instinct to survive and the deeper longing for meaning, fulfillment, and a life beyond survival. The work observes contradictory forces: violence and regeneration, destruction and renewal, control and unpredictability. And the ways they coexist within bodies, landscapes, and systems. WONDER, filmed in a crater formed during World War II, reflects this tension through a landscape that carries a trace of destruction while simultaneously becoming a site of ecological regeneration. For the residency at PACT Zollverein, we are interested in further developing this research through the relationships and conflicts held within the body. We see PACT Zollverein not simply as a backdrop, but as a living archive: a place where histories, traces, absences, and processes of transformation can be encountered physically and translated into choreography. As artists living in a region marked by conflict, we are drawn to artistic environments that embrace complexity and create space for reflection, experimentation, and exchange. The questions at the core of Études are not limited to one geographical or political context. Rather, they ask how experiences of conflict become embodied, how memory is carried through the body, and how movement can become a way of processing, transforming, and perhaps even healing. We see the residency as an opportunity to develop the project’s choreographic language, test our methodology, and respond directly to the physical and cultural environment of PACT Zollverein. We would also welcome an exchange with local artists and the wider community, and are interested in sharing aspects of the working process through an appropriate public format. ​We hope to continue developing Études: Four Chapters of Conflict through this residency, while growing and evolving both as artists and as people, in dialogue with PACT Zollverein, its artistic community, and the city of Essen.