Sept 24th. Diego to Adriano Response by Magda.
If the viewer/visitor/participant/spectator/partner (depending on the context of exhibition/sharing) is the one who is providing from outside, randomly and without knowing the structure to this practice, I wonder what does this "inside without knowing" mean, how the notions of breathing alignment and synchronicity could mingle with the notion of mirror neuron and how to engage the visitors in order to let them know that they are the practice's condition of existence instead of someone who is staring at something passively?
**October the 1st.**
**Diego asks 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 (check below)
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?
**October 29th.**
**Diego asks Rui/ Lucia and Piero answers.**
In your presentation I saw a secuence of interruptions and contaminations in a sense of "intrusions". An operation created to keep in the same track giving it tridimesionality and depth by repeating a gesture in different ways. Connecting these fragments from other films that work as references but also as a thematic formalization to sustain its unity though it breaks the time line. Finally, the repetition of the footage pops to close the piece. Themes go from one fragment to the other, jumping, going back and forth. The use of the music, is shared on different scenes sometimes bringing a new information/perception about it that was not there, sometimes illustrating, sometimes promising something that won't be fulfilled. At this point the fragments start a dialogue between them. This made me think about the cronology and time in general terms.
The idea of a present that is still contaminated with elements from the past and pregnant with the future yet to come. Is the interruption a strategy of continuation? And is the literal repetition of the footage in the end, as an interruption of the operation, an end/beginning/continuation?
**November 12th.**
**Diego asks Flavio (Deborah answers).**
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 choose 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?
**Sept 24th.**
**Magda asks Diego. Chloe answers on behalf of Diego.**
What you proposed made me think about the social and cultural capital one receives. And, also that sometimes it loses its value. I’ve been thinking recently about social privilege (how strong it still is; when one experience it; how one need to deal with his/her own privilege or its lack; and how system reproduces it or could deal with it differently). I’ve been thinking a lot of it in relation to us – people who engage in art. Who does and can do art as a profession and how does it influence the state of art as a discipline and its contents?
I read on Wiki that money (or other goods) become capital only when the capitalist invests it to gain income.
I’m asking: What do you make capital in your practice/ research? Can art nourish new directions and paths of social/ cultural capital redistribution/ production?
**October the 1st.**
**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 happens to art when art starts to appropriate life without a critical position on its purpose or transformative capacity.
**October the 29th.**
**L.P ask Diego/Magda answers**
Watching at your video, we found ourselves wondering about situation presented, where the artist is the only one that seems to walk forward where all of the others walk backwards. The situation is complicated by the fact that it is recognizable that in order to achieve that effect, which is only partially disguised, you were the one that had to walk differently from all of the others. Since you research has a strong vector towards the creation of a participative inclusion of the inhabitants of the neighborhood, we were wondering how do you feel about the position of the artist from which he/she suggests a different reading of the environment in which they all live.
**November 12th.**
**Adriano asks Diego**
You told us a story of revolt and oppression.
I was struck by the intimate, yet opaque relation between your body and the story.
You talked in third person, but as if the young man in your story might have been yourself.
The use of lo-fi and low volume background track, which may have been original recordings related to your story or something else, further twisted my sense of where and when the story took and takes place in relation to “here and now”.
Probably I am ignorant regarding your history. And while I write this, I wonder if I should know, when and where the story took place and what the relation to your body is.
I want to ask you what you would like me to do with the story you tell? Do you want me to consider the ancestral or vicarious memories in your body, and consider the many-ness of you? Do you want me to learn about the history of this kind of revolt and oppression? Do you want me to learn about the particular moment in history that shapes your story? Do you want me to think about present-day oppressions in a historical perspective?
**Sept the 24th.**
**Kasia asks Rui, Diego answers**
In your film I saw a situation of a meeting, a gathering of people who are listening to a story shared by a woman. The camera was rather zooming in than out, creating a sensation of closure, as if it were impossible to imagine that the story would ever happened outside, beyond this frame, beyond that room.
My question is: is there any 'the outside"?
**October the 1st.**
**Rui asks Chloe, Diego answers**
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.”
**October 29th.**
**SINA ASKS KASIA / DIEGO ANSWERS**
In your presentation, the haunted image of mutilated and disregarded icon of intimacy and softness devalued into garbage, I went in with you in an ontological opening on the side of road. The abyss is pictorially rich, I am still in it, and your arrival fruitful. And you didn't choose it, it was the scene that picked you up. The image takes you. But, how does one comes out of it? Or, do you think is it necessary for one to stop looking at (some) images? Could speech (or writing) be a proper way of not looking at (some) images?
Nov 12h. Magda asks Deborah, Diego answers.
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?