Card Zero is a multi-artform studio and an exercise in material worldbuilding. We create encounters that position the body as a magico/poetic technology that crafts, changes and integrates the self. This is done through experiment and composition with dance, words, design, theatre and contemporary folk ritual, and cross-pollinating ideas about ecological identity, the relational wiring of the human animal, and the relevance of culture to health. We also play with absurdity, irreverence and incompleteness as vehicles for fluidity and possibility.

As an organisation, it is a starting point for art that unfolds problems, suggests solutions and asks more questions. It constellates smaller scale works with big ideas, and serves as an anchor for experimental and divergent artmaking that incorporates inputs from independent artists, researchers and non-artists with relevant skillsets.

Lead artist: Niki Schild

Niki (aka Niki Shi) is a multiform artist and arts therapist with a rhizomatic approach to life. She is sincerely devoted to crafting and defending space for emergent, erotic, mystic and artistic dimensions of experience, which she regards as a universal birthright.