Session 01
17/09/2019
Yaen and Tamar ask Sina ,Chloe will answer
Can you describe the place where catastrophe meets you research?
@tamar and Yaen--- can you tell me what you mean with Catastrophe? - chloe
@chloe In Sina’s 5 min, he was reading Cinderella’s story, one of us didn’t really remembered the scene to recognize it, and so we were having a conversation about the seen (scene) and the unseen (un scene) information that was transported by Sina, we left with this notion, as two people having same dialog for two different things; the encounter of one’s nightmare and one’s fairytale clashed to a catastrophe
Flavio asks Muslin Brothers, Ana Paula will answer on behalf of Muslin Brothers
Hello dear Muslin Bros, in the midst of my ignorance of your fashion universe, I tried to dive right into the experience of the colors and patterns we lived with you, I was very interested in how the repetition of the experience with these colors gave birth to other colors so magically. I know it sounds naive, but I was mesmerized by the reaction of my eyes to this mix of light and color and time.
What intrigues me most is how we can think of stripes in other scopes:
- How can we transform this structure of stripes and make it a transition from a flat surface to a 3D perspective?
- Or even, how to think of the stripes within the fictional narrative? - Or, how do stripes guide the creation of body movement?
DEBORAH ASKING ANAPAULA, VIA MUSLIN BROTHERS
While you were moving with the cardboard in the video, steadying it when it was about to fall, moving back from it, in a sort of minimally-intrusive dance, I was thinking: what kind of relation can the body have to the object, if the body is not to be a subject?
If we are to understand everything as totally-but-mostly-obliquely-connected (a fabric, a weave, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would say), we still must choose to understand in specific ways: it cannot be all ways, it must be at least one way. Our understanding must be concrete. There are many ways it could be. Maybe we have a choice, maybe it is given to us. They could be religious and singular ways, non-religious and polymorphous, philosophical, unconscious, physical, embodied, non-linguistic. The list goes on. Anapaula, it seemed like you were creating a caring relation to the object, when you would reach out your hand to steady it, as you would move to keep it upright.
As though you didn't want to let it fall.
I am interested in what you are discovering in the relation to the object—is it something about you (about us), or about the object, or about the relation? Are they the same?
Here are two references, a quote from Mario Perniola's Sex Appeal of the Inorganic (2004) and some notes and quotes around/of Karen Barad from Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007).
"Having exhausted the great historical task of comparing man to God and to the animal, which in the West began with the Greeks, what claims our attention now and raises the most urgent questions is the thing. It has become the focus of both our preoccupations and the promise of happiness. The play of resemblances and differences, affinities and divergences, correspondences and disparities that has characterised the comparison between God and man, and between man and animal, has concluded in a tie. Man is an almost God and an almost animal. God and the animal are almost man. But who has the courage or the desperation to say that man is an almost thing and the thing an almost man?" Bohr’s nuanced account of prediction and objectivity entails a reworking of our classical understanding of physical reality: “The feeling of volition and the demand for causality are equally indispensable elements in the relation between subject and object which forms the core of the problem of knowledge” (Bohr, 1963a, 117). Barad: “How reality is understood matters. There are risks entailed in putting forward an ontology: making metaphysical assumptions explicit exposes the exclusions on which any given conception of reality is based. But the political potential of deconstructive analysis lies not in simply recognising the inevitability of exclusions but in insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted and in taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries.” (205)
tenderness, D <3
Session 04
08/10/2019
Tamar and Yaen ask Deborah, Magda is answering
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
Flavio ask Muslin bros , Debra 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!!!
Adriano ask magda, Yaen and Tamar 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?
Session 04
01/10/2019
Tamar and Yaen ask Quinsy Your instructive presentation was followed by an invitation for a collective engagement with a board game. Board gaming have long fascinated mirroring of intelligence, skill, cunning, and wisdom. And have been the topic of many scientific studies.
Regarding the board game itself; The surface was black and on top there were schematic white drawing of sci-fi-space themed figures, the graphic style was naive. You placed the stroll shaped surface in an asymmetrical composition and the players were given different flashlight and flashlight parts. This idea of working with children borderline adult’s game, attract us. Together with minimum instructions you let us start playing, interpret this in our perspective, which we did. it appears as everything is possible, but, was it? Then the collective aspect had changed, it became discursive and unsocial, And lead me to wonder about the relationship between the players, the objects of the game, and the rules. Were they all randomly assigned to this situation?
Our question is pointing and surfacing the urgency for intentions. A game usually have adjectives. One’s need the sensation of conquering another level, One is indulging their competitiveness and their acceleration of winning, One is for improving their skills, One is for being a teacher-opponent, One is for socializing, One’s sake of relaxing the mind and doing nothing. One is for the failure. Something is fueling the player to keep trying over and over again, And our question would be, what is fueling us, the gamers spectators, in this experience of participance, and what are the players strategic ramifications of such a game?
Anapaula asks Muslin Lucia and Piero answer in behalf of Muslin
Muslin:
Each time I see an exercise from you I have the feeling of being part of a spontaneous choreography that you are setting up in order to explore a specific idea. In your last experiment, I found very interesting this non-linear script that went through our hands weaving a situation. The little booklet brought me memories, some of them mine others don’t, some of them very distant in time, others the opposite. The exercise conect me with the idea of mirroring beetwen us. In this sense, I wonder how the relationship with this kind of text that work as a scrip for us (both performers and public at the same time) can be more powerful? Do you think that there must be some memories, actions, words that interpellate us more than others?
ap
Quinsy asks Lucia & Piero, Muslin Brothers answer on behalf of Lucia & Piero I start thinking with the ears. In the video, there are conversations framing the voice. Colourful leggings move. Calves rub against each other. A faint sound. The whispering of cloth. Home is where sound is untranslated. Where language is. Shoes on cobblestones. A market. A woman. A recollection of hearing through sight. A site of collections. The house. The Purple Cloud. A fantasy dreading the end of North-Western European heterosexual dominance. A West-African warrior sculpture for sale at a European flea market. Science fictions centuries ago. When is it all real? Can we really enter the reality we hear? That is not the question I pose to you. It is a question in passing. Barely audible people of African descent appear one after the other. A hug. A gaze. A wander. The voice continues. Slowly. Deliberately. Focused. Poetry. Fragments of untranslated conversations interject. Intentional disruptions of the whisper. Sounds overlap and envelop one another. Is this the moment that the mirror listens instead of watches?
Session 06
29/10/2019
Magdalena and Deborah It was charming to think about the space as young teenagers in chat room. it includes of personification of colors, parts of the room, part of peoples works and was describing a moving scenario of the object's passive actions (passive as it was done on them/to them) and location. While the presentation we huddled as little mice around the screen and i remember i found these 'characters's expression used in the chat as sexual. In second reading i dont find it as sexual as before, but i see a sweet violent in it.
I have 2 question you can pick one (or both)
1- colors are one of my favourite elements and immersing bodies and collectives in it is a professional aspersion of mine. Can color be the only/ main language you use ? 2- Adolescence. theres much to say about this molotov cocktail of naivety and trouble. however as a filter, what would your practise do as an entity in its adolescence years? XX T+Y
Attached mini screenshots of google images: color vs google images:adolescence
MAGDA ASKING MUSLIN BROTHERS / SINA ANSWERS Fashion pictures covered with pink papers evoked in me an uncanny feeling. This intervention was simple but effective. The clothes become for independent sculptures. They resembled me of a body, but without seeing it I could not really imagine its look. It was for me obscure and beautiful at the same time. In the text, what called my attention, was that descriptions of the qualities were referring mostly to the clothes, and lines addressing the body were referring to the meaning, statements and symbolic system. How do you look at a body? How do you practice looking at the body? Does the body surprise you? How? What politics govern your gaze directed to the body? Are you open to looking at it, again and again, embracing its dynamic nature? What is the body beyond being a 'system of symbols'? Can dressing undo the body?
Rui asks Deborah / Muslin Bros answers
Dear Deborah,
In your presentation, you were hidden behind the table manipulating the computer. But every time I looked at you, you immediately looked back at me intensely. In the atmosphere you create and also thinking about your poem (“I don’t want that world made of thing! (…) The thing is alive like weeds (…) Both realms forever”), what’s the importance of your presence?
Session 08
11/11/2019
Question by Muslin Brothers for Adriano Rui Answers on behalf of Adriano
During your presentation we were the object that changed position, while being with our eyes closed someone lead us to the new location, other senses become sensitive in order to estimate and evaluate ourselves in the space. where am I positioned in the space? Who am I standing next to? What direction am I facing? We were pretty occupied by that also after your presentation was long ended; A space for distance, A place of displacement Afterwards i checked the definition of Displacement In physics, Distance and Displacement are two distinctly different quantities. Distance is a ‘Scalar quantity’ that refers to the total movement of an object without any regard to direction. We can define distance as to how much ground an object has covered despite its starting or ending point. while displacement is a ‘vector quantity’ therefore has a direction and magnitude. It refers to the measure of how far out of place is an object. So for the question- Where would you find this kind of ‘Displacement’ present in your work?
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
Hello dears
Well, Flavio asks Magda. Muslin Brothers answers on behalf of Magdalena
Magda, this is in me after your action:
The relation of the immobile body with the outer space. Visualization, memory and imagination. breaking the outer space through inner space.
What is the space in this action. What moves the body in space? What moves the space in the body? What (how and who) draws time? What does time draw in me and in the space? What is the central "trouble" in your action that you want to stay with? What about expanding the trouble for the next and last round of the looming score?