Rui asks: Chloe
+ answers on behalf of: Kasia
a question posed by: Diego
Adriano asks: Magda
+ answers on behalf of: Rui
a question posed by: Kasia
Deborah asks: Flavio
+ answers on behalf of: Muslin Bros
a question posed by: Flavio
Flavio asks: Muslin Bros
+ answers on behalf of: Deborah
a question posed by: Muslin Bros
Quinsy asks: Adriano
+ answers on behalf of: Sina
a question posed by: Magda
Chloe asks: Diego
+ answers on behalf of: Flavio
a question posed by: Deborah
Sina asks: Quinsy
+ answers on behalf of: Adriano
a question posed by: Quinsy
Magda asks: Sina
+ answers on behalf of: Quinsy
a question posed by: Sina
Muslin Bros ask: Deborah
+ answers on behalf of: Magda
a question posed by: Adriano
Diego asks: Kasia
+ answers on behalf of: Chloe
a question posed by: Rui
Kasia asks: Rui
+ answers on behalf of: Diego
a question posed by: Chloe
keywords
- Sexy/sensual : naked bodies, burning bodies, desire, genitals, eros mentioned twice
- Childhood, shame, touch, intimacy of getting close divisions (in terms of groups, creating audience strutures, make experince in a group
- labor (implied in solving the puzzle, instructions, giving out instructions, ) isolating an element from the background, taking a gesture and highlighting it, creating fragments
- fragmenting (in storytellings, images, in video, etc. bit of something, of text, producing a commons by our collective labor, the intention is not to create a whole / a resolution)
- face as the location of the stage-like, as the place of the event face => linger (something that lingers and stay with you after looking at a face, gentlly disappearing, )
- recycling (past things, things from last week or childhood or history or objects)
- Mobilising something that has already been here in order to produce new relations.
- the essence of game (puzzle, childhood game, making believe, fairy tales, mimicking the statue game
- construction of a presence (intensified co-presence, or one's own withdrawing back or forth...)
- construction of 'being left alone' (in the audience)
- airy, atmospheric, not condensed, no sharp edges, gentle
Kasia asks: Rui
+ answers on behalf of: Diego
a question posed by: Chloe
Dear Rui,
In the video you screened we see two men talking. However we never see them depicted fully. There is a sense of fragmentation, body fragmentation.
I see torso, head, hands. I see faces. But - although the take is very still, static - I experience destabilisation. The communication is torn apart. The filmed room is full of melancholy of impossibility.
At certain point Falvio asked Diego to tell the story that he reports once > again, but without words, only by ‘using’ his face. I see Diego's eyes changing the strength and content of his gaze, its focus, I see subtle shifts in his facial expression.
My question is: to what degree we need our bodies to communicate?
Warmly
Kasia
Muslin Brothers asks : Deborah
+answers behalf of: Magda
a question posed by: Adriano
Im laying down referring to the habitus of the body, or the un physicality of this posture; submissive, vulnerable, asymptote to a 2D surface. while our touching feet, transmitting and receiving the heat of others. Oh.. Concentration: Embodiment and Eros and Transcendence.
Overlapping voices of the explanatory beginning are seeding in my mind an orchestral tuning and building expectations of the coming future? present? past? Or, did I eavesdrop to their meeting in a far away planet in the vast sky, behind immigration of clouds. damn, what were we asked to think about?
Our question related to distance and the distant author. Is compartmentalization needed in order to distribute knowledge*?
*knowledge Stands for any affect you would like to disturbate in your work
with T.L.C
Tamar & Yaen
Sina asks Quinsy
--> Magda will answer
I really enjoyed the collective play that the puzzle evoked. The music was itself a puzzle or a detective device. I needed to dig in to it without any tools... As I was trying to help, in the vortex of hands touching and relocating the parts, I thought about concepts of artistic labor and value, time and the creative investment that was embodied within the work of figuring out a broken peace of history. After you left, we actually solved it, with Tamar leading the team drive. It was quite satisfying to be honest. I was wondering then, there was the thing there, that which was recovered (or remembered). We were trying to guess whose body parts was this (North African maybe?). When the act of solving reached its end, it turned to an act of recovery (not a fragmentary, but a total recall). And I felt in my body the stoic nobility of the laborious, painstaking, and humble work of putting back together that which is broken. I asked myself which knowledge (of the colonial archaeology) is potent for constructing which (post-colonial) worlds? What are the differences between meaningful labor (the point is solving the puzzle) and absurd labor (the point is not solving the puzzle)? Is that why you didn't play with us? The artist wants "us" to solve this. Because of that, the artifact paradoxically lost its significance. If so, what was your categorical labor of looking (at us from outside solving a problem you posed and you were not interested to solve)? Was there anyway that we could have surprised you?
*
Adriano asks: Magda * Muslin Brothers answer *
You put headphones on and announce the beginning of the performance. Opening a private and a public space at the same time.
"This is not a room…. it is an architecture of feelings/a shelter/a jungle of desires/the plants, touching my lower back from a distance…"
Crowdsourced experiences stream through you, from headphones, through mouth, into the”not a room”, immersing.A leaky phenomenology sprouts, not quite yours, leaking into and through, not quite ours, immersing, leaking into.
Boundaries blurred with accumulation of cuts: Headphones between your ears and ours, last weeks proposal between the text and the situation, one experience slicing through another.A phenomenology that becomes leaky by cutting and weaving.
My question is about the place of group. How defined or developed a group need to be to engage in such cutting and weaving?
Flavio asks Muslin Brothers
and Deborah will answer!
Hello again dear Muslin Brothers. This week we plunge once again into a participatory performance action. I will briefly report my impressions as the “audience” of this action:
Very interesting to be in front of pieces of clothes that have no intimate relationship with me. In this way, the initial impression is the same as when we are facing pieces of a theatrical costume or even a party costume. Then the action propels us into a state of intimacy with the rest of the group; after all, undressing is an intimate action, even for art people who are somehow accustomed to these moments. The script is in our hands and it jumps from simple physical actions score to a more philosophical reflection on how the world of clothing is designed to reinforce different gender relations. We conclude with the internal investigation of sensations and senses of the body regarding the touch, weight and temperature of the try on.
I have two questions, one as “audience” (1) and one as a co-worker (2):
- How do I serve the performance action without losing the reflection of the whole, without closing myself in the internal gaze of the action?
- How do we conduct a participatory art action measuring and leveraging the experience of the audience in order to transform this experience into data and documents that can move the research forward? Is it a question of protocols?
Finally I want to say that I feel a great political potential of this performative action when it brings gender reflection in the script. Let’s get deep in gender issues!!!
Diego asks: Kasia
+ answers on behalf of: Chloe
a question posed by: Rui
Dear Kasia,
In your video I saw the emptyness of the city early in the morning, no human beings at sight, nor human sounds, nor human movements.
Is this a world ruled by machines? Who (or what) is recording this scene...? How passive can be the gaze? The gaze of whom (or what again)?
What a contrast between that passiveness and the violence of the machines!The idea of science fiction emerges and with it, some aspects begin to grow. The violence of machines destroying the building, destroying the structure. Those giant mechanical arms moving part of the rubble.
Where were the human beings at that moment?
The action that seems to be registered is always blocked by a blind fence or because of a perspective that doesn't help to see what seems to be the main thing to be seen... but, what is the main thing here? and what is the main thing to be seen in a broader sense?
The question of the center and the perphery araises and with it all the meanings that could appear through a narrative made of periphereal things, events, sounds...I reminded the Futurist manifesto https://www.societyforasianart.org/sites/default/files/manifesto_futurista.pdf
The Man dominating the Planet Earth, the Nature"We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit."
Both, Nature and planet, understood as feminine aspects that men have to conquer and subdue. This turns inmediatelly into a dystopic future... or a late premonition?.
I kept thinking about the materiality of what you shared with us (more precisely the overexposure of light because of the beamer), as well as the distance between the material you produced and how its materiality is, considering the conditions of its exposure.
So I wonder about the gap where one lose the control of the object while it is being performed linked to the appropiation that tecnichal aspects can do (autonomously?) over the objects by bringing (or projecting) a new and unexpected meaning layer upon them?
Chloe asks Diego, Kasia Answers:
A list of things present:
- People in pairs
- Standing
- A queue
- A line
- Waiting
- Overhearing
- A paper strip
- A circle
- A mobius strip
- hand written text
- instructions passed along the line
- voices— one of which is mine
- reading
- english language
- the state
- the citizen
There is an appropriation of language, the bureaucratic language of the state, into a situation firmly framed as art. I am curious how this appropriation— that is taking something from one context and putting it to use or producing new uses of it in another context— thinks of the potential for art to transform life. ok, stupid question, scale is way out of proportion. But nevertheless, it feels extra important within your work to understand how you think the relation of art and life. If reproducing systems we live through happens in art, the question is "to what purpose?". When taking material that was composed without consideration of it being art, for example... a legal text on immigration... do you consider the appropriation to serve art: it provides aesthetically interesting proposals to art, changes what art can be... or that engagement with the materials in the context of art produces politically interesting situations to the state (or the polis or the world etc). In both equally valid options (I write that because of course I myself have preferences for how art and life can go alongside one another and want this question to try, even slightly, to be more towards you than departing from me) they propose different ways to interact with the material and suggest different uses of it. On the one hand it is my subjective experience of encountering this appropriated material that could transform my relation to the language of the state, and on the other the material being proposed within art could pose a critical stance to the system itself. It is a question about what is my function in relation to the purpose of the materials. As I did feel like a functionary in how i was an audience/participant. ok, so there are a few questions you can pick one. It's complicated, but the question "to what purpose?" remains interesting to me and an answer with regard to methology or strategies of appropriation or reappropriation, not in order to understand what I should experience in relation to your work (which would be to prescribe its affectiveness) but to ask.. what can this do? I am worried what hapens to art when art starts to appropriate life without a critical position on its purpose or transformative capacity.
Rui asks Chloe,
Diego answers
Dear Chloe,
Your confrontation of sentences, gestures and images of paintings/sculptures creates powerful questions about how we see/read/listen/do. This reminds me of Rancière’s text The surface of design: (about Mallarmé) “This poem freed of any scribal apparatus can be compared with those industrial products ad symbols of industrial products that are abstract and separated from the consumption of resemblance and prettiness – the ‘aesthetic’ consumption which complements the ordinary course of circulation of commodities, words and currencies. The poet, like the engineer, wants to oppose to it a language of streamlined form, a graphic language.
If these types must be substituted for the decorum of objects or stories, it is because the forms of the poem, like those of the object, are also forms of life.”“The engineer aspires a correspondence between form and content. It wants the object to correspond to its body and to the function it is to perform. (…) This correspondence between their icons and their nature, is at the heart of the idea of ‘type’. Types are the formative principles of a new communal life, where the material forms of existence are informed by a shared spiritual principle. In the type, industrial form and artistic form are conjoined. The form of objects is then a formative principle of life forms”.
“The designer engineer intends to revert to a state prior to the difference between art and production, utility and culture; to return to the identity of a primordial form. He seeks this alphabet of lines in the geometrical line and the productive act, in the primacy of production over consumption and exchange. (…) This equivalence of the graphic and the visual creates the link between the poet’s types and the engineer’s. It visualizes the idea which haunts both of them – that of a common physical surface where signs, forms and acts becomes equals.”
So, are you interested in make readable/visible the procedure in which words and images slid into one another and could it shift the meanings? Do you think your body takes part in this procedure in an unique way (other bodies would create other results, or what matters is this confrontation of words/gestures/images, regardless of which body takes part)? During your presentation, do you think how your body (as a surface that carries information of gender, ethnic etc) is readable/visible?
*sorry, another quote to explain better the other quotes: “A symbol is primarily an abbreviating sign. It can be imbued with spirituality and given a soul. Alternatively, it can be reduced to its function of simplifying form. But both have a common conceptual core that authorizes such all such moves. I referred to it in connection with the text by Albert Aurier that makes Gauguin’s La vision du sermon a manifesto for symbolism in painting. The mystical peasant women iconized in abbreviated forms, which Aurier makes into neo-platonic symbols, are also the Breton women in headdresses and collar who featured as advertising icons on the boxes of Pont-Aven biscuits for almost a century. The same idea of abbreviation symbol, the same idea of the type, unites the ideal form and the advertising icon. (…) In similar fashion, poets or painters, Symbolists and industrial designers, make the symbol the abstract element shared by the thing, the form and its idea.”
Deborah to Flavio,
answered by Chloe
Flavio,
I had a similar experience when I was younger, with another girl. An adult walked in, I can’t remember who, it wasn’t my parents, and I never knew if they found out. When you said “shame” I thought “shame!” in agreement and echo. Let’s talk about shame.
X
Magda asks: Sina
Dear Sina, From childhood, I remember different ways of hearing a fairytale: somebody reading it to me (and it was a difference if that was my mother, father, grandma or a teacher - they read differently, they were giving them a divergent emotional meaning) or listening to it from tape (an old fashioned audiobook). Listening to it alone or in a group in kindergarten, in the afternoon or before going to sleep, while being outside or in the tent made of blankets. Then, at some point reading it on my own becomes another story. All that was meaningful and was changing the reception and the meaning of both, the event and a fairytale itself.
What are the necessary conditions to receive your text? How do you do things with your text?