Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, Lyd / Sound, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
Texts, reading and writing came out to be the topic of October and November last year. First, in the workshop Verb Lists – Knowledge Done Again at the conference Mobilityshifts : International Future of Learning Summit at New School in New York and later, in a talk about Roles and Relations in Artistic Research at the ISCP International Studio & Curatorial Program, a talk which nevertheless morphed into a collective reading-writing session.
The workshop Verb Lists – Knowledge Done Again was developed from a symposium held in Copenhagen in June 2011 with the University of Copenhagen, Freïe Universität and Goldsmiths University of London, which I co-organized with Adam Drewes, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Martin Glaz Serup and Trine Friis Sørensen. The symposium was called How to do things with academia and questioned traditional ways of organizing and performing academia. All participants submitted, instead of an abstract, a manual of how to do something differently with and in academia. Divided into 5 groups some 30 people worked intensively over a period of 3 days to create 5 collective manuals, which were printed and performed the last day.
In my group (consisting of Thorbjørn Becjman, Jürgen Bohm, Paola Crespi, Janis Jefferies, Trine Friis Sørensen and myself) we had DIY universities as our topic and somehow ended up creating a circular manual of “doing” as such inspired by Richard Serra’s Verb List from 1967-68. We literally read the verbs out loud, performed them, video recorded it and then asked others to interpret our movements thereby generating a new list of verbs. The new list of verbs was then performed, recorded, interpreted etc. creating a never ending manual translating verbs into action, actions into verbs and text into image, image into text.
The transformation of verbs to physical movements inspired Trine Friis Sørensen and I to translate the manual into the driving force of a workshop for the Mobilityshifts conference in October 2011 at the New School in New York. With a critical intention to question the discourse of the “educational turn”, which has influenced the European art scene the last decades, we decided to look at core texts from the discourse in terms of what verbs they use and thus what actions they ask us readers to perform. We were interested in asking if the sometimes abstract and idealistic theory, which we both are inspired of in our work, could be grounded and materialized in simply performing the verbs of the texts.
We chose to work with Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Irit Rogoff’s article “Turning”, Anton Vidokle’s “Exhibition as School: unitednationsplaza” and the text material from the Mobilityshifts conference itself. From these texts we chose central paragraphs and extracted the verbs into two verb lists. During the two hours we were scheduled to do the workshop we divided the participants into two groups, asked them to perform the verbs of one of the verb lists, recorded them doing it and swapped the videos for the other group to interpret their movements.
The reactions were many, some understood the concept without further questions and jumped easily into the exercise, others questioned everything. Roughly, some expected to learn a useful teaching method, others were happy staying with an open situation in which an experiment was being carried out and in which the means were more important than ends. Finally, we never really discussed the actual discourse of the “educational turn” (it was not clear how present this discourse was among the participants, we assumed that they were well informed as the conference material referred to initiatives considered part of it), but somehow we ended up performing it instead. To stay with the process and the means are key features of that discourse and this was what actually happened. One, who focused on the ends straight from the beginning and kept discussing what we were doing, was told by one of the others to “stop wanting to know everything beforehand”.
What we learnt from the workshop were two things. One, that on the one hand it takes something to make people go through a two hour session that is not focusing on results, but on the other hand that this situation carries a lot of potential. And two, that having had one more hour and having made the participants find the verbs themselves would have made the texts more present and the discussion of them potentially more open for realizations about the discourse.
One of the participants in the verb lists workshop was Mirene Arsanios, a friend and colleague who also participated in How to do things with academia and with whom I have been developing public reading and writing exercises during the past year. Being co-founder of 98weeks Project Space in Beirut she was invited by the ISCP to present 98weeks there during a one month residency. Mirene had asked me to do a talk with her and what we proposed was something about roles and relations in artistic research in relation to 98weeks. However, and more excited about trying out new ideas rather than cementing old ones, we decided to do an open and collective reading session to explore the mechanisms of reading desires and writing. Some 30 people gathered with the book they were reading at the moment and after a short introduction we sat reading in silence. Whenever one felt the urge to share some lines, one would go to the microphone and read out loud a paragraph. This was recorded and rules were simple. All the time one person had to be live archiving the event taking notes on a computer and one could swap books with another person, but then one had to go to two computers to take notes in a shared google document.
Unfortunately, we had to stop after an hour, because just at that moment the group found a rhythm, got hooked on writing and dived deep into the reading/writing experience. Afterward, while sharing the leftovers of the wine, we dreamt of doing this for hours on and on. With people coming and going, falling asleep, eating, smoking, drinking and sharing their often lonesome reading experience. There might be a chance we can do so in Copenhagen in March, if so, you are all invited.
Filed under: konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, texts, The Love Libration Movement
TEXT TASKS. A COLLECTIVE READING PERFORMANCE
Sunday, 6 November, 3PM, at the ISCP, New York
http://www.iscp-nyc.org/
Sidsel Nelund and Mirene Arsanios would like to invite you to reading performance on Sunday Nov. 6, at 3pm.
The performance will explore reading as a collective practice by proposing a series of tasks, to be carried out individually or in group. If you would like to join the performance simply bring the book (or any text) you are reading at the moment.
—
For more info, see ISCP and e-flux
Filed under: Beirut, bla bla on writing and language, konversationpieces, Kunst / Art, notes on cph, texts, The Love Libration Movement
A while ago it was a Saturday afternoon. We wanted to go reading in a café. It got late, like 6 or 7, and we ordered some food and beers. We were three people, J, M and I. J was commenting a paper and writing in the margin. M was reading a book she had gotten from another M. I was reading Nelly Richard, a masterpiece; Margenes e Instituciones. As the local families left the café the younger generation of cph hipsters started entering. M and I invented a reading/writing exercise where we took notes of each our books in the same notebook mixing minds and sudden reflections. As the night came closer and the café turned into a going out place I felt increasingly uncomfortable. As if reading, writing and thinking were not appreciated in this party-collective-social-happy setting. I told M, who got a bit offended and claimed that it was because I was not absorbed enough in what I was doing and that first of all she would not operate with a distinction between the intellectual and society. That was what I had done, I had questioned the role of the intellectual in public space. Because the feeling of not being wanted there resonated with the lack of intellectuals in public opinion, the lack of time to listen to reflections and the lack of people reading books in public space in Denmark. Experts investigating specialized areas are not that hot.
A couple of days later we met again and something had happened, she gave me some texts about the role of the intellectual and we continued the discussion. Somehow we decided to think more about it. Do readings in different places and reflect about the text, the place it was being read out loud and the relation between them.
We didn’t have the time to carry out the experiment. But some weeks later we met up in Beirut and wanted to do yet another project, a summer exorcism, a ghost dance on a platform in a wasteland in-between highways, rubbish and houses. We didn’t have the time to that either, but had nevertheless decided to do something there the following Saturday at twilight. It ended up being a reading/sleeping interaction, just for us and the passersby. M tried to fall asleep and I tried to make her do so while reading a sort of random collage of fragments of texts. We sat there for and hour and a bit more. She never really fell asleep, it was full of nature, mosquitos, bats and bushes. Only guys passed by us, I could hear their steps as they climbed the stairs, crossed the platform and walked down. They didn’t approach us or gave us comments. Not until afterwards, when we had finished and were leaving through a nearby street. A guy whose steps we recognized made the classic coquette noises and interpellated us into heterosexual women in the street. Apparently, before that we had been something else and had had a situation that was not to be entered. Both our Saturday night intellectual-interventions were in that sense exclusive, which I cannot clearly identify as a problem, a consequence or just a mere fact that does not mean that the intervention did not resonate with its surrounding.
Filed under: bla bla on writing and language, Santiago stories, The Love Libration Movement
There he was, again: ”You can do better than that. Bring interesting thoughts to the fore. Don’t think you have to please people.” This time we were sitting on a terrase viewing Valparaiso at night. I had invited both of them for a Pisco Sour. I looked at the lights, the sea and the dark reflections moving in the cold summer wind. Soon it would be autumn, in April. This was just another thing I had to get used to; inversion of rythms that meant clashes and conflicts between my body, it’s stubborn habbit of orchestrating itself by seasons, daylight, weather. Now I could only submit and it, my body, didn’t like it.
I registered his presence next to me, how he was attentive for an answer, or more, a response. ”But I cannot do that, you cannot expect me to be clever on behalf of being displaced, uprooted.” … ”I’m exhausted, I’m trying, but I really don’t know what to do. I can only register, I can only take in; I can smell, look and listen as far as my body lets me do it.” … “And just to let you know, to register is a phenomenological methodology; always first register. And this, I want to follow.” (1)
Now our voices were loud, in front of us was a smiling face, a smiling, but investigating face. What are they doing, why are they word fighting? Why this clash?
Today, I learned that ”soy” does not only mean I am in Spanish, but also spoken word and woven material in Dogon language. (2)
Yesterday, a woman told me she by chance had read my story on returning to Denmark. She really liked it. It made her hair rise. ”It’s Sisi who’s writing this!” She didn’t know I liked to write. Or, like to write.
That’s another thing. I’m learning a language. A new language. One day I wrote in my diary: ”Today I said the rr-sound correctly for the first time.” I felt like a baby registering its own first word. It’s on this stage I find myself, like a fragile being without words in a new world. How does he want me to reflect, to bring interesting thoughts to the fore?
What felt in the fore, in front of me, was a wall. I met it everytime I went out. ”So, what are you doing here?” ”Do you know Spanish? Oh, you’re learning. You really have to improve your Spanish to get somewhere.” (I know that, I’m not stupid, why do you think I’m spending my savings on private lessons?) ”What would you like to do here?” ”Oh, you came here because of love? I suppose that’s good, I mean, or what….” ”Do you have any plans for your future?” (What do you think yourself, I do, of course, but how can I make plans in a situation I cannot control, a situation I don’t know?)
One night I told someone that my future doings would not only depend on me, but also on the place, Santiago, my new city. She got aggressive, it did not depend on the place, but on the attitude. One can make it everywhere, it only depends on one’s attitude. I retrieved from that discussion. Didn’t care and didn’t dare. Too much, just let me be, don’t look at me, don’t reflect me, I don’t want to face myself.
Today, an other woman told me: ”There’s a difference between seeing oneself as a link in the net and being subjected to comparisons of oneself to others.” (3) It helps me to retrospectively answer back that other woman, the aggressive one. I don’t want to compare myself, “to make it.” But maybe this is what people see in me, a Western woman coming here to make it?
Traditionally, I cannot be an other woman as I’m from the West, from Europe. I have red hair and milk white skin with a bit of freckles. I cannot be Other. My body tells the world so. And yet, I feel so other, so otherly other. It’s nice. And it’s completely horrible – like when the nasty speaker in the conference wants secretely to know about that wonderful woman in the back. Viejo verde (4) was a clever response of an other older woman. She’s been in the business for some years. She has found her way.
This is what I’m trying to do; find my way. I get small confirmations on the way. Like reading this sentence: ”To be an other among others can be a profoundly transformative experience.” (5) This is what i want. I want to be transformed, I want to experience, to live and to love. And this is what I am doing, what makes me so utterly happy. But also what rubs off so otherly many sparks, so much heat that it’s not only nice and warm, but hot like hell.
-
It was today he played the song that said I love you badly. We were sitting in the same room in front of each a table. Writing and reading. Concentrated. The refrain made us look at one another. This is why we’re here, we’re here because we love, badly, too much. We sleep close, we eat close, we bike close, even our desks, our books, our clothes want to be close.
And here we are, now, again, he’s looking at me, with a smile. An investigating smile. Why is she so concentrated, what is it that she’s writing? He hasn’t known me always, he’s still learning. But he knows. He approaches me and kisses me. Just in time, at times, I guess. (6) Outside, Santiago is turning dark, the cars are flickering together with light from commercials. Champagne and socks. The Madonna is still there, on the hill, holding her hands over the city together with the 80’s cell phone shaped building. We have to finish, we have to go out there, to become embraced by noise, smell, pollution and the many encounters, between people, in nets, among others, among each others. Once again, I ask the tissue of neighbourhood to grasp me when I’m falling. I think it likes me, I think it’ll grap me, rescue me and give me a hand everytime something pushes me over the limit. Up, again, we’re here, we’ll hold you, as you’ll hold us.
1: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1992, p. viii: ‘It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analysing.’
2: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1989, p. 128.
3: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Films Featured at Documenta. An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha and Genevieve Shiffrar. June 26, 2002. Page last visited May 10, 2009.
4: Viejo verde means an old man who likes young women in Chilean slang.
5: Minh-ha, 2002.
6: Bowie, David. “Cygnet Commitee” in Space Odity, 1972.
Filed under: bla bla on writing and language, Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, Kunst / Art, never written books - or telling titles, The Love Libration Movement
Hvad jeg gerne ville skrive om på bloggen lige nu:
En intro om at læse en intro, der udreder et kludret og endeløst forgrenet stamtræ, som vokser og vokser og bare bliver ved og ved og er kortlagt bagest i bogen, så man bladrer frem og tilbage og repeterer på vejen, men forstår kun lidt – min intro ditto.
Om det hemmeliges potentiale som værende det ultimative skabelses-frirum i en kunstnerisk kontekst
Om Walid Raad, “performance as faith” og Raads fascination af enkeltpersoner i historien.
Om at vågne op og ikke vide hvem man er eller hvor man er, men være sikker på, at det er juleaften.
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, In the mood for, The Love Libration Movement
“If you play me, I’ll play you” is a sentence I still haven’t understood. It appeared in a talk by artist Hassan Khan at Homeworks IV in Beirut last April. It was just a sentence in a sampled pop song or something like that – but it has kept lingering in my head. Like a play back system. Now, reading an interview on love with the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller I’m wondering whether the sentence might be a synonym for a psychoanalytical understanding of a love relation between two people. Jacques Alain Miller says that one loves the person that can answer the question: “Who am I?” and it means that one has to acknowledge one has a lack that the other person can fill. As such, one is also dependent on the other person, which is why some people become aggressive from love – it’s difficult to admit one’s dependency and thereby one’s independency.
If you make me play, press the magical play button that make my self sing on all of its strings, then, I’ll play you(rs).
Ocean's Thirteen and a love dilettante in a screen. Flying to Beirut the 24th of October 2007
Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a blog. Or maybe I should say; Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a block. A writers blog/ck. A couple of hours later I received this email:
Sisi
chatting with you today, I had the idea of writing in the blog about resistances and voices, intuition, breath. Is there a nice passage on the voice that I can have a look at? There is the Michel Serres book here, Genesis, going to have a look.
bawse from the office
Miro
I answered:
yes, i have something for you, i’ll scan it, kisses, s
I went upstairs to the scanners at my university and there I found two pictures with their white back facing me. I decided to scan them without knowing what they depicted – it may be a sign!
It was not, or maybe it was. A sign of campus life and a happy youth; snapshots (or not, it was paper photographies) to be send to friends or family abroad.
cut
The passage I wanted to scan for M is from The Black Beach by Edouard Glissant. I hadn’t been thinking of this text for two years until i read the words resistances and voices, intuition, breath in M’s email. I hope the silent ghost on Glissant’s beach will provoke some thoughts. They both gave me a reason to post a block.
(I imagine two young women (one at the corniche in Beirut and one on the beach in CPH) walking in resistance and silence, listening to the breath and voices of the sea)
Love is a ruin. It decays, but it always stays the same. The use of it ceases to exist. We don’t know what to do with it. Anymore. So we sit. And we wait. We even left the chairs. Now they’re standing there, as two ruins in a lit setting. Spotlight is on. The stage is there. It’s freezing cold, at least minus 5 degrees. No wonder why we left. Not even the light makes it cozy or warm.
So I got them a strawberry plant. It has small green strawberries on it. Soon they’ll be red and ready to eat. And next year the plant will have dissiminated, more plants will grow from this one and so, in a couple of years their new family house will be full of green strawberry plants with white and yellow flowers. The plants will take over, cover the house. And then, the girl slept for thousand years. She woke up, there was a prince, able to cut his way through the strawberries and wake her up from her dream. What a shame, it was so nice to sleep, to stay with the ruin and live its dreamworld. Now she has to rediscover her house, the castle of her parents and the whole kingdom. Underneath the kingdom there’s a hidden world. It never ceased to decay. It keeps it’s life going, because no one dares to enter it. It cannot be decided to ruin. So she asked, what is it that cannot ruin? The love for someone, for a place? Is love existing as a renewed ruin, always alive… There was a temple, in India, a temple praising the sun. She laid down, drank a lot of water. The mountain was grey and stoney like the temple. Predicting the path of the sun. Thousands of years old. And on the way, a group of children followed them. Until they couldn’t walk anymore. To reach the ruin. As a never happy ending catastrophe. And there they sat, or did they, on two chairs in the freezing cold north. They temselves entering the only possible life, a decaying, collapsing life. Love is a ruin.
Filed under: bla bla on writing and language, Kunst / Art, The Love Libration Movement
i know you got charm and appeal.
you always play the field.
i’m crazy you are mine.
as long as the sun continues to shine,
there’s a place in my heart for you.
that’s the bottomline
(- so let’s face it, it interests us. after all it’s our field; a battle ground? a playground?)
email to mirene
and thinking about borders and places. to me home works IV was inspiring for two reasons:
1, that you, kati and i were spending time together within a frame that generated thinking and that we rediscovered a desire and a need to act; ghost dance project, the article for exit and a possible proposal of a writing workshop for a.a.. we seem to have taken up some threads that were already there in london, and now they have developed into different directions. it adds people to place and borders and i really think the environment within or outside of academia is extremely important, i.e. i believe in collaboration and collective reflection (alongside solitary studies, if wanted)
2, the complete interdisciplinarity of the event (home works) was a great statement. interdisciplinarity between disciplins and between peoples practices. not for the sake of interdisciplinarity, but because it showed that what you are not necessarily what you do.
point 2 became much more apparent when coming from and going back to a danish context, where the borders are kept quite strict. many artists still believe that art historians are people who never succeeded to become artists or that art historians are in desperate need of artists to interpretate wildly over something which is quite banal; there’s still the idea of the art historian as someone who lives from artists (like these animals) and that even though this is a close cirquit relation, it’s not regarded as 1 organism, but 2 really seperate things. what we have is the role of the art historian as a mediator and not as a producer… not as someone who creates a thing on its own (as they tried to teach us at goldsmiths) and thereby there’s no possibility of generating anything new that might have the potential of being political.
this environment is of course killing together with academia, where one cannot experiment with new forms of text (should one?). one can only experiment with ones research as i try to do with my archive. but this archive cannot be incorporated into the academic text i’m writing.
place/borders/people – borders are there for people to cross them and experience new places/contexts… should we try to eliminate any border between theory and practice..? i’m not sure, but i know it’s necessary to have a space for this elimination/playfulness etc. should it be within academia? – yes, why not. it will give a serious space for such proposals to unfold.
the political – agency. some of the texts mentioned in the beginning (Roland Barthes: barthes on barthes Ranciere: politics of aesthetics, benjamin: the author as producer, sedgwick: paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you, okwui enwezor: the artist as producer in the time of crisis) relate to the political through either openness or creation of the new/creation of an abruption to make people take a stand. the text itself has a potential, which the artwork has as well.
regarding the new and liberalism i think the discussion after brian holmes‘ lecture at home works was interesting, because it touched upon the need of creating new possible dreams for people with the dilemma of having neocapitalism and liberalism incorporating these dreams immediately. and it asked the question, should we produce the new for the sake of the new? and what if the new is worse than the old?
Filed under: The Love Libration Movement
Maybe site specific love has to do with the different implications of the noun: SPELL?
spell 1 |spɛl| |spɛl|
noun
a form of words used as a magical charm or incantation.
• a state of enchantment caused by such a form of words : the magician may cast a spell on himself.
• an ability to control or influence people as though one had magical power over them : she is afraid that you are waking from her spell.
PHRASES
cast a spell on it’s as if this town cast a spell on me.
under a spell not fully in control of one’s thoughts and actions, as though in a state of enchantment.
under someone’s spell so devoted to someone that they seem to have magic power over one.
ORIGIN Old English spel(l) [narration,] of Germanic origin.
spell 3 |spɛl| |spɛl|
noun
a short period : I want to get away from racing for a spell.
• a period spent in an activity : a spell of greenhouse work.
• a period of a specified kind of weather : an early cold spell in autumn.
• a period of suffering from a specified kind of illness : she plunges off a yacht and suffers a spell of amnesia.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: variant of dialect spele [take the place of,] of unknown origin. The early sense of the noun was [shift of relief workers.]
Sentences underlined are those I find significant for site specific love – in particular in the case of a person visiting a city (see the very thoughtprovoking and somehow (un)grounded (when I say ungrounded i mean grounded because love is conducted by a place/a ground and ungrounded because love flourishes anew by always visiting new cities, love is trembling and restless, existing in different spheres) quotation in Site specific love – prologue). Site specific love is then related to time (tempus (defined as a period)), geography (geographikos, earth + write/draw (a specific city)), specificity (specificus, species (this specific city and what it casts off)), magic (magikē (tekhnē) ‘(art of) a magus’ (the spell the city casts on one)), movement (movimentum (moving around this city)) and company or the idea of it (compaignon, ‘one who breaks bread with another,’ from Latin com- ‘together with’ + panis ‘bread.’ (the existence of a (possible) lover and of eating (with) this lover)).
(when using parantheses in the above I’m inspired by and indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida and Jalal Toufic (once again))
And then I’m asking myself, why is this interesting? Isn’t it just post-romantic thoughts of and for wealthy, rich first world people, who can travel/cross borders and have time to wonder in the cities of the world? people, who don’t have to marry for social reasons, security, tradition etc.? people, including myself, who trip on the idea of love? Where is the relation to reality? Where is reality? What is it? A dream? Of Love? But, doesn’t everybody share this dream? So, maybe it’s interesting. But then, where did the place go? And who is then, at the end of the day, in love? Those under a spell? Those not fully in control of their thoughts and actions, as though in a state of enchantment? Those who suffers a spell of amnesia? Who knows. The city does. It holds them, the loving couples, at night, in parks, at cafés, in pubs, at funfairs, and in embrace while a narration is taking place.
