Score #1 Pick up an object, a surface, a body part of your choice Close your eyes Touch it as if by touching it you discover its existence and qualities Touch it as if you don’t know it. Touch it not to recognise it Open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish Describe its qualities when you feel like. For example : it’s soft and sharp. Seems limitless. If the score is played in group. Reinforce the description you just heard and add the ones belonging to what you are touching. For example: yes! Limitless and rough.
Adriano asks Chloé - Lilia responds
Dear presentation of Chloe on september 17th.
You made a strange entanglement of spacial architectures visible to me: architectures of Chloes body, of my gaze, of the room... Sliding backwards as forwards as backwards through and between them. On the spot but moving “maybe, maybe” from “here, here” to “and there, and there”. It made me feel enveloped by space as a dynamic, yet structuring agent. I want to ask you about time, is there as many times entangled as spaces? and if so is there a way to make these entanglements graspable the way you to me made different kinds of architecture visible?
Yours truly,
A
Madga asks Lilia - Sina responds
Dear Lilia and Sina,
The proposed practice made me wonder if the collective body that is generated through it is a manifestation of our social body or a potential one, speculative.
I ask:
How the art practice can be the place of practicing the potential collectivity radically (so that it does not just represent the social structures of power or personalities that are present in a group but enters the speculative space) and how the practice can create conditions for not settling down in one recognition (gaining one group identity, creating own history that becomes a reference for development) but facilitate continuous forgetting (so stay focused on practicing the potentialities)?
How the practice can be the space of an ongoing rebirthing of common?
How the practice can be constructed to facilitate it?
See you soon,
Magda
Score #2 Score for at least 3 people on touching and other dimensions Position yourself in space in a relative large distance so that you have to speak rather loud to be heard Pick up an object, a surface, a body to start with Close your eyes Touch it as if by touching it you discover its existence and qualities. Touch it as if you don’t know it. Touch it not to recognise it If you want open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish Describe vocally the qualities of what you are touching when you feel like it. For example : It’s soft and sharp. Seems limitless. Reinforce the description you just heard by repeating it and add the qualities belonging to what you are touching. For example: yes! It’s limitless, rough and also warm. Once in a while use the words: stop, continue, repeat as instructions to moderate the communication between the score players Once in a while use the words: now, before, never, always, sometimes, ...
Quinsy asks Magda - Lilia responds
Dear Magda and Lilia,
Apologies for the tardiness, but hereby my question:
A looming score. A score of interaction and collaboration. A score of improvising. Fred Moten appears. Rain drops encountering patterns. Structures of thinking become visible. We're sitting on a black runway. A stage for a ballet of sorts. The bass will follow. An answer to a question about desires. Answers centering on gaps of knowing. Filling pieces. Denise Ferreira da Silva. Together in corners in the middle of the space. Struggles against placelessness. We're silent. It's making me think of Singing in the Rain. Transitions. Voices consumed collectively. Hoarse throats and loud digits. A presence through the shuffling of messages. Sounds of paper between fingers. How do we improvise what we already know? How do we veer away from solitary references of knowledge and back towards the collaborative generation of wisdom? How do we disconnect hierarchy from sentiments of responsibility?
Sincerely,
Quinsy
Deborah asks Lilia - Kasia responds
Dear Lilia,
Here is something I wrote once (https://www.plinth.us/issue07/birch.html).
When I was taking part in your piece and when I realised something of the collective imaginary object we were creating—touching and enveloping the object, speaking our relation and echoing the others—I thought of this passage, particularly that an 'echo is the sound of silence, the silence of the room turned back on itself.' An echo is a measure of distance. It is tactile.
There is something about the intentional distance you asked for, something about touch, and something about the echoing.
I am asking about that, but there is no question mark. Or maybe there is. But it might be a different question. If duration is a measure, a tactile sense of time that brings us back to what we're doing, "and when I know what I am doing, I experience who I am" (Peter Handke): what kind of tactile-time experience is my imagination with objects ("I delight in it") fostering?
I do not like to face myself, and so I face myself turning away. That is all I can hope to be. A facing and a turning in the right direction.
I am a stance, but I am not a position. This is facing up to care. A facing and a turning. To what is hollow.
I must, I must.
I must not: this is myself. How can I destroy myself? Easy.
There is no Easy. Easy is a voice.
Easy is a word.
I am sorry for such empty hollowness. You will forgive me now.
I have betrayed myself. I have already turned away. I clutch at Easy as though it would stop me crumbling to dust. I turn and face Easy with all the fervour that I would turn and face myself. Easy is a foil. It is the winking eye of the portrait on the wall that I pounce on saying, See! You moved. Because I am afraid that I am not the only living thing. Because I am afraid of the animism of objects. I am afraid because I touch objects as though they were alive. Each of them is cheek and chin and bone. Hi, I say. Ohhhelloo. I coo. I stroke and coddle my objects. It is shameful how I degrade them. I delight in it.
I parse and prod Easy. I abuse Easy to prove that it is just a word. Because I am afraid it is more or less malleable than myself. That it is more hollow and more substantial.
I am afraid of the substantiality of the photos on the wall. Each photo is a voice. They say what is there, they say what can be said. It is not enough. An echo is the sound of silence, the silence of a room turned back on itself. Why is it that a cathedral has such a loud echo? Because it is a house of silence. To communicate with a God is the space of the self turned back on the self. The measure of the silence of a man.
And what is a woman? A woman is a man.
And what is a man? A man is also a man.
AS TO KEEP ELABORATING ON A SCORE WITH MANY FACETS Score for at least 3 people on touching and other dimensions. Blurr-ing as a way to move forward Position yourself in space in a relative large distance from each other so that you have to speak rather loud to be heard Pick up an object, a surface, a body to start with Close your eyes Touch it as if by touching it you discover its existence and qualities. Touch it as if you don’t know it. Touch it not to recognise it If you want open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish Describe vocally the qualities of what you are touching when you feel like it. For example : It’s soft and sharp. Seems limitless. Reinforce the description you just heard by repeating it and add the qualities belonging to what you are touching. For example: yes! It’s limitless, rough and also warm. Once in a while use the words: stop, continue, repeat as instructions to moderate the communication between the score players Listen always. Listen through touching. Once in a while use the words: now, before, never, always, sometimes, ... If it comes to mind describe a situation from elsewhere as to create new ontologies by displacing realities. For example: It is like being at the sea side. The sense of no borders.
Score #3 Score for at least 3 people on touching and other dimensions. Blurr-ing as a way to move forward Position yourself in space in a relative small distance from each other so that you have to speak rather softly to be heard Pick up an object, a surface, a body to start with Close your eyes Touch it as if by touching it you discover its existence and qualities. Touch it as if you don’t know it. Touch it not to recognise it If you want open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish Describe vocally the qualities of what you are touching when you feel like it. For example : It’s soft and sharp. Seems limitless. Reinforce the description you just heard by repeating it and add the qualities belonging to what you are touching. For example: yes! It’s limitless, rough and also warm. Listen always. Listen through touching. When it comes to mind describe a situation from elsewhere as to create new ontologies by displacing realities. For example: It is like being at the sea side. The sense of no borders.
Lucia e Piero asking Magda. Lilia answering in behalf of Magda.
Dear Magda,
looking at your presentation we were considering the idea of breaking a body in pieces in order to be able from these pieces to build another body. It seems legitimate to ask ourselves what body do we choose for a materialization and what follows from this choice. What is the body you choose? What are its properties? What do these properties do in relation with the context?
Magda asks Lilia
Anapaula answers
Firstly my attention attached to and followed the sound of touching, then when performers started to talk my attention was navigated by the moments when texts were merging - this is when one performer picked up a word from another one or spoke as she would continue the sentence of the one previously speaking. After a while objects started to be used in unconventional ways (positions, ways of keeping them) and watching that together with hearing the words and time passing made the environment on the table transform and I started to look at it as on something I don't know. I didn't name what I saw but there was some fiction created. What, in the collective practice as such, can a conscious playing with fiction bring? What can it produce for the reality of the practice?
Score #5 Score for at least 3 people on touching and other dimensions. Blurr-ing as a way to move forward Position your bodies in the space. Mingle with each other. Close your eyes. Touch the bodies as if by touching it you discover their existence and qualities. Touch them as if you don’t know. Touch them not to recognise them If you want open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish Describe vocally the qualities of what you are touching when you feel like it. For example : It’s soft and sharp. Seems limitless. Reinforce the description you just heard by repeating it and add the qualities belonging to what you are touching. For example: yes! It’s limitless, rough and also warm. Listen always. Listen through touching. When it comes to mind describe other bodies that you can associate to the ones you are touching Dear Quinsy, (Dear Lilia,)
in your mode of storytelling, as an audience I was faced with an unfolding of a serious (if not mysterious) matter. your suspense allowed a continuous engagement with you, and also sustained a relation between you and us, in which one is disarmed and quieted in order to hear the full story till the end. we are at the presence of both an *effective narrative* and an *edifying discourse* ['edify' meaning: to make understand, to enlighten.] you used a style of storytelling that blurs between being an *evidence* and performing a *testimony*. an implicit [not enunciated] *search* for an absent and fragile *witness* of the (catastrophic character of) events you face or care for. this search (not research) is not really looking for a legal default, it is rather a form of demanding it. you ask rhetorically "where is the witness?". the police is called in, material evidence mobilized, historical documents shuffled up and zoomed, and so on. we are in the space of a trial, which is in this case, not to reach a definitive verdict, but as a form of historical and political pedagogy.
in your presentation, you had this box that was sent to you viciously. after which you called in the bomb squad to open it. my question is that, why you didn't open the box?! i am taking that box as a metaphor, of an unwanted potentially dangerous gift, that by opening it you put yourself at risk. this is not a sadistic jinx, but a question of research. why you don't want to explode?
Flavio asks Lilia, Chloe answers on behalf Lilia
My body has its world or understands its world without having to go through representations, without subordinating itself to a symbolic or objectifying function... I am not in space and time, I do not think of space and time; I am in space and time, my body applies to them and embraces them. The breadth of this apprehension measures the breadth of my existence (Merleau-Ponty, 1994, p.195).
From experience I feel that training, perhaps implicitly, is even therapeutic.
Why not think about the healing dimension of the experience?
Which agency frames the healing dimension of the experience to an aesthetic one as well?
What are the tensions between knowing and not knowing the other's body?
What are the tensions between faking or not faking the touch?
How do such tensions draw the dramaturgy-score of this action?
Score #6 Looking as touching Score for at least 3 people on touching and other dimensions. Blurr-ing as a way to move forward Position your bodies in front of the window. Look at what see as if by looking you discover their existence and qualities. Look at them as if you don’t know. Look at them not to recognise them If you want open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish Describe vocally the qualities of what you are looking/touching when you feel like it. For example : It’s soft and sharp. Seems limitless. Reinforce the description you just heard by repeating it and add the qualities belonging to what you are looking/touching. For example: yes! It’s limitless, rough and also warm. Listen always. Listen through looking/touching.
Dear Muslin Bros. and Lilia who answers,
While watching your expo I was struck by the way the cut-outs were displayed.
The flatness of the large sheets of paper - in 2D - carried enormous reduction. Since all what I was informed about directly (the captions about certain technical solutions used in cloth making process and the procedures applied in a prison) and indirectly (my knowledge of a user, a person who wears clothes) related to a 3D experience. It felt as if it was so easy and unpunished (sic!) to magle the complexity of the matter, life, actions and present it like this, on the table.
Yet this reduction was not only troublesome, but carried also a quality of something pure, poetic, bare. I found this five minutes a meditation time.
Was is rather a meditation on some leftovers, like a shed snake’s skin - left when it reaches the point that the further growth is impossible and is ready to renew, or rather on death, stillness, loss?
Greetings
Kasia
Lilia, Flavio
Lilia, you asked us to look as though touching, but we couldn't seem to do it, or we couldn't translate that into speech.
We mostly stood there, mute, observing, looking out the window at the fading light. I remember at one point being lost in thoughts of the outside, and then lost in what I could say to add to the description and, finally, giving up, feeling a bit guilty, and then feeling that we weren't up to the task or the task wasn't up to us. No matter how clear instructions are, sometimes we can't be made to follow.
Luce Irigaray says the sense of touch is "the sense that underlies all the other four senses, that exists or insists in them all, our first sense and the one that constitutes all our living space, all our environment. [...] This is the sense that travels with us from the time of our material conception to the height of our celestial grace, lightness, or glory."
If the attempt was to make seeing like touching, what would touching like seeing (sight at its most extreme or caricatural) be like? Skimming, scanning, gazing, scrolling, flicking through.
Would it make us more aware of how we touch and how we see? Does the negative path come to the same place as the positive?
Also, this is an aside, why do the rest of us get to watch the participants touching? Why aren't we all in the dark....
looking as touch
SCORE #7 Moving as touching Score for one or many on touching and other dimensions. Blurr-ing as a way to move forward. Take these instructions as suggestions. Position yourself in space not so far from each other so that you feel the others presence. Close your eyes Travel inside your body sensations by moving slowly. Like if you are touching your body through movement. Responding to touch through slow movement. Dancing. Slow dancing. Feel it as if by moving your body you discover its existence and qualities. Move it as if you don’t know it. Move it not to recognise it If you want open and close your eyes rapidly as the objective of a camera as many times as you wish. If you want describe vocally the qualities of what you are feeling. For example : It feels like extasy. Seems limitless. Reinforce the description you just heard by repeating it and add the qualities belonging to what you are feeling. For example: yes! It’s limitless, rough and also warm. It's bleu. Once in a while use the words: stop, continue, repeat as instructions to moderate the communication between the score players Listen always. Listen through moving. If it comes to mind describe a situation from elsewhere as to create new ontologies by displacing realities. For example: It is like being at the sea side. The sense of no borders.