POEM made of excerpts of BEHALF + 2 ME
a framed encounter
no character development
no script.
several ontologies.
it is once again possible,
the production of new
boundaries.
You cleared a table.
You seemed to know.
It made me think.
I always feel my own expectations
and this quality deepens
once again.
I will briefly report
no intimate relationship.
I had fun.
The state of undressing,
it jumps from actions
to reflection
on sensations:
on how the world is designed
- the touch, weight and temperature -
to reinforce relations.
complexity through simplicity.
the internal gaze,
data and documents,
a question of protocols.
Let’s get deep in gender
from 2D to 3D
from 3D to 2D
the relation between rigid and soft
constant and with small variations
I was mesmerised by
accident, trouble,
and deviations of a slower nature,
I was mesmerised by the will of matter
soft, patient, listening.
Descriptions turn “poetic,"
offer a small protection
from full exposure
or transparency.
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
the notion belongs to the landscape
the surface
filled with words:
“nonliving intercellular collagen,”
chemically bound crystals
or mineraloid matter.
igneous rocks, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks.
Can you bring us next time?
'Dinge in meiner umgebung'
things in our environment
are our condition.
an intimate fresco,
they do not stand still.
images from your childhood,
oral traditions,
are not fixed.
Let us see you fragile.
I heard a kiss.
the voice of the mother
the first voice
the voice of the father
that invisibility
condensing many different times.
two contrasting vectors,
distancing.
I could feel my back against the floor,
could feel my skull.
the feeling of not being enough.
I heard marble.
I heard your voice without a body,
the edge of my own body,
the soul.
I heard Saint Teresa.
I eavesdrop
on overlapping voices
from a far away planet.
you were hidden
manipulating the common origin
“Both realms forever:”
I want to stay with this
catastrophe
The place of origin.
T.L.C to a 2D surface.
Embodiment, Eros and Transcendence.
what are the desires you want to nourish
in us?
Why are dancers always laying around?
Is listening touch?
Oh.. Concentration
I’m submissive,
asymptote,
lying down.
Bodily linked,
touching two other people
Am I more connected or more alone?
Where is the edge
where is the outline of a stone?
Can bones (secretly) communicate with other bones?
I ASK
17/09 #1
DB > AP / MB
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
24/09 #2
DB > Lilia / Kasia
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.
01/10 #3
DB > Flavio / 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
08/10 #4
DB > Kasia / Quinsy
Dear Kasia,
Two images. One moving, one still.
One religious, one navigational.
Both can be considered icons.
The religious icon, and the plane icon (X)
From the Greek eikôn, 'image.'
You framed both with your body. You kneeled in front of us and cradled the computer on your lap. We sat in front of your kneeling body and watched the images on the screen. The juxtaposition seems more pertinent by they way you framed them with your body.
The unmoving religious icon in mosaic. You told us where you saw it, and that you didn't want to know what was written on the scroll in his hand.
The moving navigational icon on a screen, on the back of a seat, in a plane. We can see the destination named on the map. The plane moves slowly in to land.
Just as we frame time by entering into ritual or spiritual spaces, you decide to frame ordinary duration via the plane in the sky, filming an icon that references you as a passenger. A self-portrait then? Of attention?
15/10 #5
DB > Flavio / Adriano
thoughts of archeology and other conceptual tools, but actually what I keep coming back to is my understanding that you wanted people to remove the sheet, be exposed to your exposed body, and have to confront what you choose to confront us with: nakedness, scars, history written on flesh. Exposure as vulnerability and risk, relating sometimes in your history to shame and trauma.
That's my understanding of what you wanted. Instead, no-one removed the sheet, except for an arm, a foot. So your nakedness lay hidden, and your exposure unexposed. Then we are archeologists of a different sort, tentative, unwilling (or slow in willing), too slow in any case to uncover what is waiting to be uncovered.
It reminded me of Abramovic's Rhythm 0 (1974) where she placed 72 objects around, like a feather, knife, rose, etc. It took hours, and it started off slowly, but the temptation and lack of resistance brought out an intensity and and aggression that seems to me linked to a dynamic of vulnerability-violence-temptation-shame.
It seems difficult to bring the audience quickly to a dynamic that might only arrive unconsciously (a slow, imperceptible gradient of action), which mirrors social time (blind, un-individuated, sometimes thought of on the level of drives/impulses).
What are the methods that you can bring the audience into your vulnerability in a short space of time? Who is the agent? What happens when the lines are blurred?
Tenderness
xd
29/10 #6
DB > Sina / Kasia
Have you heard, my friends, of the vegetable lamb of Tartary?
It's how we get the cotton from the clothes we wear.
According to John Mandeville, and others,
this tree-wool grows on the fruiting bodies of the lamb-plant.
When they are hungrie, says Johnny M,
a fabler & word-spinner from the 14th C.,
the lamb-boll* can dip down and nibble some grass.
I tell my father, a cotton-grower, and he laughs, amazed.
Who are the freaks of nature?
And what are they?
Being miraculous, they exceed us, and in exceeding us,
they are excluded from the logic of our world.
Do we value the outsider
as long as the outsider
remains outside ?
Is this a question? Or another kind of statement.
Is fable? This kind of statement.
Visible question marks, and shadowy full stops.
Let's get prolific, Sina, let's go your way.
Kosmos, in the Ancient Greek, meant both order and ornament.
Order, the code of things, and ornament, its visible manifestation.
Glitches in the code—the freaks of nature as unstitched threads—
are the ornaments of a hidden order, the one that brightens our eyes,
and makes us marvel.
The hybrid forms, the miribilia, the freaks and wayward facts,
they are the chinks in the armour, the gaps in the walls,
of our world.
They are the sacred signs, pointing us to our own
incompleteness, to the prison of cause and effect.
They say, the logic of what you know makes you fall asleep,
the tram, elevator, and mobile phone, are science-fiction
for past epochs, and you are almost always bored, until
wonder wakes you up.
Re-enchantment. Re-enchanted. Re-enchanter.
The storyteller, the re-weaver of a hidden code into the one
we know, chooses to fix the wayward threads more or less in
faith—of the necessarily monstrous real, or of the real necessity
for the monstrous in the real, or something else altogether.
The wonder as fixed in the object, or the wonder in the subject,
or something in between.
Wayward threads pointing to a logic, but not spelling it out.
Not spelling it out?
The grammar of the statement in the fable is the question mark
that lies behind it. An existential one?
Penultimate fil rouge. Kathy Acker:
I hadn't decided to be a person. I was almost refusing to become a person, because the moment I was, I would have to be lonely. Conjunction with the entirety of the universe is one way to avoid suffering.
And what if, by some miracle, you are not allowed to become a person?
Does denial of humanity force another kind of conjunction with the universe?
Last thread: Trachi the centaur, alias Primo Levi.
He lived mostly in solitude, left to himself, which was the common destiny of those like him. [...] He learned Greek from the island’s shepherds, whose company he occasionally sought out, despite his shy and taciturn nature. From his own observations, he learned many subtle and intimate things about grasses, plants, forest animals, water, clouds, stars, and planets; I myself noticed that, even after his capture, and under a foreign sky, he could feel the approach of a gale or the imminence of a snowstorm many hours before it actually arrived. Though I couldn’t say how, nor could he himself, he also felt the grain growing in the fields, he felt the pulse of water in underground streams, and he sensed the erosion of flooded rivers. When De Simone’s cow gave birth two hundred metres away from us, he felt a reflex in his own gut; the same thing happened when the tenant farmer’s daughter gave birth. In fact, on a spring evening he informed me that a birth was taking place and, more precisely, in a particular corner of the hayloft; we went there and found that a bat had just brought into the world six blind little monsters, and was feeding them minuscule portions of her milk. All centaurs are made this way, he told me, feeling every germination, animal, human, or vegetable, as a wave of joy running through their veins. They also perceive, in the precordial region, and in the form of anxiety and tremulous tension, every desire and every sexual encounter that occurs in their vicinity; therefore, even though they are usually chaste, they enter into a state of vivid agitation during the season of love.
[*boll: the seed capsule of plants like cotton and flax]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_Lamb_of_Tartary
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/08/quaestio-de-centauris
Tenderness
xd
05/11 #7
DB > Kasia / Magda
Dear Kasia,
I was interested in a specific moment of your presentation, when someone asked you "what does precious mean in this context?"
You began your presentation in a gentle manner, you directed us to the table, and then you said, "Oh, you can touch them," as though you didn't realise that we would wait for you to invite us before touching the objects.
I liked that when the question was posed, you paused, looked at the questioner, thought about it, and then said you will finish the presentation and then answer the 'precious' question.
It was uncompromising, but still gentle. It gave me a sense that you have a vision for what you want, and you're more interested in preserving that than giving us what we want. I like it.
Imagine that instead of a question mark there is something like "...."
[I want more] [TBC]
xd
15/11 #8
DB > Lilia / Flavio
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....
x
BEHALF
Answered ON BEHALF
17/09 #1
Lilia > Rui / DB
a glimpse of a moment. a framed encounter. edited cuts in the filmed a situation. people relating without a cause, figuring out, negotiating cuts, power, feelings. no character development. no script. several ontologies. continuous interactions or could they be intra- actions? The camera and the filmed as part of the same game. Experimentation.
All this made me think of Karen Barad and her discourse upon ‘agencial realism’. Both quotes underneath refer to her thoughts on how we (humans, non-humans, apparatuses, nature, culture constitute each other) and are part of the following article: Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding ofHow Matter Comes to Matter
https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/sv/sai/SOSANT4400/v14/pensumliste/barad_posthumanist-performativity.pdf
I would be interested in understanding what do you think about this and how it manifests in your protocol.
“On an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and that theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role “we” play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming.”
“…apparatuses are constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, re-articulations, and other re-workings. This is part of the creativity and difficulty of doing science: getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose (which is always open to the possibility of being changed during the experiment as different insights are gained). Furthermore, any particular apparatus is always in the process of intra-acting with other apparatuses, and the enfolding of locally stabilized phenomena (which may be traded across laboratories, cultures, or geopolitical spaces only to find themselves differently materializing) into subsequent iterations of particular practices constitutes important shifts in the particular apparatus in question and therefore in the nature of the intra-actions that result in the production of new phenomena, and so on. Boundaries do not sit still.”
“A crucial part of the performative account that I have proposed is are thinking of the notions of discursive practices and material phenomena and the relationship between them. On an agential realist account, discursive practices are not human-based activities but rather specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted.”
24/09 #2
Adriano > Quinsy / DB
Dear Quinsy
You cleared a table and asked who knows how to play domino. A couple of people said yes and agreed to play, me included. We played once, and then another different group played. You seemed to know the game well, playing fast and having a idiosyncratic way of holding and placing the pieces. I had fun playing and watching others play. Apart from or, on top of, that fun the simplicity of the proposal generated an absurdity for me, and the experience confronted me with my own expectations about what (art)work is at apass and what you might propose in relation to your research. So while the proposal was simple and enjoyable, it opened a range of questions for me. It made me think of the work of Krõõt Juurak in the sense that I always feel like I can explain her work to a five year old, and how this quality deepens the profound and complex nature of the work, rather than flattens it. Giving a lot of space, while at the same time challenging my understandings or presumptions of the situation, of what we are doing here and of who we are here. Me question is: Is it necessary in order to create that kind of absurdity and complexity through simplicity, that the proposal is performed by you and that its a single table, or could it be delegated and several?
Thanks alot, Adriano
01/10 #3
Flavio > MB / DB
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!!!
08/10 #4
Lilia > AP / DB
To Ana Paula
A way from 2D to 3D. Your presentation seemed like an experiment on scientific observation using 2 cardboard squares held by 2 people on both sides. We positioned ourselves in two lines behind the two people holding the cardboard. The movement of the ‘holders’ was quite and steady which made the lines of people behind be constant and with small variation. I think the experiment had to do with the relation between rigid lines (cardboard) and soft lines and how they interact. I wonder how the relation between these two components could be more expressed. The lines of people having evident self will and the cardboard being of a slower nature. I have to think also about accident, trouble and deviation as the possibility of seeing otherwise. The other day I came across this video that departs from a line of separated points that evolve in fantastic patterns. I was mesmerised by the will of matter.
https://www.facebook.com/100000569644221/videos/2716147938414168/
Have a nice week! Lilia
15/10 #5
Adriano > LP / DB
Dear presentation of Lucia & Piero, A promise of observation. Observation from you - of what concerns most of us. You were sitting next to eachother. Soft, patient, listening. An analogue complicity situated between one big and two smaller screens. Descriptions turn "poetic" "I'M FLOATING, THE HEAD IN THE AIR." "I REMEMBER STANDING FOR SOMETHING. CAN I STAND FOR SOMETHING NOW? NOW SITTING?" "HOW MANY METERS OF AIR OVER MY HEAD?". Not much is written, is this writing an excuse for sharing time/presence? For sitting next to eachother and in front of us, while the laptops offer a small protection from full exposure and/or transparency. If that is so, what is the minimum of text and screen needed to give a cover for presence?
29/10 #6
Kasia > LP / DB
Dear Lucia and Piero
Last Tuesday I witnessed a speech given by a half of your duo - Piero, on Ludwig Wittgenstein. We were there. We, your friends, colleagues, fellow a.pass students, a random gathering of people looking at you and your audiovisual after-image, on the wall, when the time was over.
Piero, your speech was recorded and broadcasted, but I wasn’t sure to whom. To those who were there or who weren't? Was it because of the absence of Lucia? You announced it, in a way.
But I’m still wondering, Lucia, whether you were too busy and committed to acting in Rui’s movie, as if the collage he composed was really demanding and required a special attention, and just couldn't / didn't want to join?
It felt like (more than on any other day of scoring) that you couldn’t be fully present in both entities but also that the content of Piero’s story about Wittgenstein excluded that possibility. That it would be just too much.
Is it true? Or is it enough that for me it worked like this?
One of the most famous notion by Wittgenstein philosophy is this quote: “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” I assume Piero that you knew that we are aware of this, that we can't not to know the sentence. And then, for me, it belongs to the landscape of your 5 minutes.
Your time was filled with words, a description, a story of Wittgenstein. But it felt like you deliberately stayed on the surface (of the content and of the image you proposed - an image of multiplied you).
What is behind the limits of this bit of world you shared? What in un-known, un-explored, beyond this very horizon? Can you bring it to us next time?
Greetings, Kasia
05/11 #7
AP > Magda / DB
Magda,
As you probably know, I feel very connected to your research, because in a way I feel reflected in what you are looking for, the other day, searching some essay that Kobe (a mentor of the past block) recommended me, I came across with this (and reminded me you):
"Flusser is not interested in categorizing or defining objects. In the essay 'Dinge in meiner umgebunbg' (Things in my environment) [...] he states that the only useful description of objects is that things in our environment are our condition and that they not stand still. According to Flusser things are a 'current circumstance' [...] that change permanently. The identity of an object is not a fixed one, as our condition and environment shift and modify perpetually"
in your presentation you talk about collaboration, and I wonder, How would be a collaboration between your body and objects of the 4th floor, considering both of them as a 'current circumstance' as Flusser thinks. How to make explicit this quality of permanent change? How to focus not in the identity but in the features that not stand still?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3527162?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
12/11 #8
Diego > Flavio / DB
In your presentation you took me through an intimate fresco with care, empathy, attentiveness…, you always let us see you fragile and tender, though without victimizing yourself.
I enjoy your skills to bring themes, actions or ambients from your narrative to the performative action you use to tell the story. In this case, the action tends to become invisible and “out of program” which is beautifully connected with the themes of the story, your position in the bolck/group and the "crossing borders" moment you choosed to do it.
You depicted images from your childhood that are there (in you) because of an inherited family narrative. I started thinking about oral traditions, about what remains within the family narration generation after generation. That immateriality shapes us up. I think in the voice of the mother as the first voice that gives you words to keep that narrative on; and finally, in the voice of the father approving or disapproving who/what/how you are, bringing that “Café con leche” feeling, that invisibility, that “out of program” status.
In your personal path where scars speaks about wounds/burns and suffering as a healing process while it freeze the time of the event in your skin condensing many different times of your life, many different “you”, the scar plays a liminal function. It let all the material and metaphorical wounds by burns, by hot milk, by fire; all the frozen time, the many “you”, the mother’s voice bringing the narrative and father’s voice bringing the feeling of not being enough to this place where all merge.
I wonder which are those “not enough” that change depending on the context but are not infinite. What would be enough and for whom? Does the healing process end turning the “not enough” into a strength? If it does, how that strength would modify the narrative in that biographical fiction key and the discourse upon it?
2 ME
17/09 #1
LP > DB / Magda
In your presentation we perceived two contrasting vectors: on the one hand a tendency towards making the presents feel welcome and confortable; on the other hand a strong distancing between the public and you (physical and vocal presence, display of knowledge, dynamic of the space....). Is this a precise decision on how you want your research to encounter us? What are the desires you want to nourish in us by meeting your research?
24/09 #2
Chloe > DB / Rui
Dear Deborah, I was lying down, I was listening, I could feel my back against the floor, my spine resting in its curves, my feet opening, my shoulders hanging heavy, I could feel the small hollow at my neck , the back of my skull and the depth of my face. I heard Saint Teresa, a kiss, marble, the soul, the foot.
In laying down the visuality of the experience receeds, the sensory capacity of the front side of my body, that which keeps us facing foward starts to soften into the back. And then your voice, through the amplification, comes toward me without a body. It was interesting for me, to feel the expanse of your voice, and the edge of my own body. I wonder how you think about the act of listening in relation to what is heard and how the practice of listening you propose opens the work to not only what is heard, but something else as well.
I want to ask about the site of listening, about where listening happens, if its in a body or through a body. Is listening touch? In this shift of orientation, being horizontal, the body is activated in a particular way. What is activated depends on each persons history of laying down with others and in public. I think it is interesting for the social history it brings for each person. I recived an email from a friend who makes a magazine called stillLife the next issue will be on laydown or being horizonal in social spaces, he asks at the end of his email, why are dancers always laying around and does it say something about the dancers economy? not sure exactly where he is going with this question... How does laying down relate to, or resist the laboring body? Or, what kind of labor(s) is being asked of the audience?
01/10 #3
MB > DB / Flavio
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
08/10 #4
Kasia > DB / Magda
Dear Deborah,
Every time you ask us - a group of people loosely connected with each other in the framework of scoring - to be bodily linked during your presentation, I ask myself the question on abandonness.
Am I - at this very moment, while laying on the floor and touching two other people’s feet - more connected or more alone?
This time, when I was listening to your voice (and I found the story you told us, a sort of meditation narrative) one particular sentence drew my attention: bones that are like stones.
For me stones know more than anybody / anything. It is hard to say how long do they really exists, what did they experience. Where is the edge / the outline of a stone.
Do you think that our bodies also have this ability? The ability of dissolving into sand, these small rocky, glazed molecules that become uncontrolled, free nomads going though structures, states, materiality of things, entering bodies?
Are our bones these parts of the body that can (secretly) communicate with other bones, regardless factual body distinctions, gender, rational divisions - all common categories that we use to get certain about who & where are we, what are we supposed to do?
best
15/10 #5
AP > DB / Sina
Deborah,
while you were reading you poem about bones and stones, I was thinking a lot about the chemical composition of both of them I was wondering how similar they are and what they have in common, then, I was looking in the internet this: Bones: "Depending upon species, age, and type of bone, bone cells represent up to 15 percent of the volume of bone; in mature bone in most higher animals, they usually represent only up to 5 percent. The nonliving intercellular material of bone consists of an organic component called collagen (a fibrous protein arranged in long strands or bundles similar in structure and organization to the collagen of ligaments, tendons, and skin), with small amounts of proteinpolysaccharides, glycoaminoglycans (formerly known as mucopolysaccharides) chemically bound to protein and dispersed within and around the collagen fibre bundles, and an inorganic mineral component in the form of rod-shaped crystals." https://www.britannica.com/science/bone-anatomy/Chemical-composition-and-physical-properties
and about stones, wikipedia says this: "A rock is any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter. It is categorized by the minerals included, its chemical composition and the way in which it is formed. Rocks are usually grouped into three main groups: igneous rocks, metamorphic rocks and sedimentary rocks. Rocks form the Earth's outer solid layer, the crust."
So, they do have in common something inorganic: minerals, I wonder, how could it be tracing back the common origin between bones and stones through your writing?
best, ap
29/10 #6
Rui > DB / MB
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?
05/11 #7
Chloe > DB / Flavio
coffee and milk
12/11 #8
Magda > DB / Diego
Dear Deborah, Dear Diego
Sorry for the late delivery of the question. 🛫🛬⏳
Deborah, in response to the question that addressed the matter in the room we were in, your story took us out of it. You redirected our attention to what is happening now but elsewhere. The catastrophe that is maybe not-visible to us here but that is very actual to us. The place you talked about was not any place that you knew about but the place of your origin, that you are connected to. I want to stay with this personal charge. I want to ask you how would you work with this personal charge in/through the form of the presentation/ performance?
Warmly,