PARTICIPANTS
The Drumhead
The Setup, p. 13
Ladies. Ladies and Gentlemen.
Ladies . . . . . . and Gentlemen . . . . . . . . . and Gentlemen.
Ladies and Gentlemen. Thanks for coming . . .
Gentlemen . . . Ladies . . . . . . Ladies . . . and . . .
Gentlemen . . . . . . and . . .
…
Document 13.0, p. 89
Today I let a faltering mosquito live… it was on the sill where I was perched, blowing smoke out of the window. Bugs here don’t hold the same sway they do in places closer to the tropics, in a Specific Ocean, so I let this one off the hook.
…
Throughout the last six years, text has become central to the production of artist Gerry Bibby’s endeavours. The Drumhead, a novel published by Sternberg Press in 2014, draws from quotations and the narrative impulses in his sculpture, performance, and image work, interlacing their ‘language costumes’ into greater scenarios, a multipart stage set. Working on site—in collaboration with: the KUB Arena of the Kunsthaus Bregenz; The Showroom, London; CCA Glasgow; and commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution in Amsterdam—the text bears geographical residues of its institutional encounters.
Gerry Bibby’s artworks move across performance, sculpture and writing, exploring exhaustion, sensuality, social modes of production, shifts in function, and forms of intimacy, intrusion and estrangement. Currently based in Berlin, his recent exhibitions and collaborations include Autocenter, Berlin; KUB Arena, Kunsthaus Bregenz; Silberkuppe, Berlin; The Showroom, London; CCA Glasgow; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam.
Translation in the First Person
Translation, wrote Gayatri Spivak, is the most intimate act of reading. But what kind of intimacy does its action produce? What is it like to experience it? And how to talk about it? In this reading, I describe scenes of walking, reading, writing and translating as a way of taking some bodily measure of my own closeness to—as well as my keenly felt distance from—the late work of Roland Barthes.
Kate Briggs is a writer and translator based in Paris. She is currently at work on a new translation of Emile Zola’s The Experimental Novel and a book on translation- and table-making. She is the translator of Roland Barthes’s How to Live Together (2013) and The Preparation of the Novel (2011), published by Columbia University Press. Other publications include: Exercise in Pathetic Criticism (2011) The Nabokov Paper (2013), both published by information as material; ‘Small Hand (a paper-size poem)’ in Convolution: A Journal of Conceptual Criticism; and ‘Practising with Roland Barthes’, forthcoming in L’Esprit créateur. She is a core writing tutor on the MFA in Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, and also teaches at the American University of Paris.
Recuperating
Poetry reading.
What happens in transfers: art, music, texts
Talk. Concerned with transfers, and typically with modes of transfer. What happens when a given text, a given sound/a series of sounds, a given image is transferred onto a different support? We will look into the paradoxes of literal transfers (when one text, image, sound is apparently transferred to another support without modification), we will also go beyond these paradoxes. Among the artists, writers, musicians we will consider are: Andy Warhol, Kenneth Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, Roberta Flack, and French artist Alain Jacquet.
Vincent Broqua (Paris, France) is a writer, translator, and a Professor of North-American literature and arts at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis. His work focuses on experimental writers and artists such as David Antin, Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Jen Bervin, Joe Brainard, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anne Waldman, Rosmarie Waldrop, On Kawara, Andy Warhol, Christian Marclay, and others. He is the co-founding member of the Double Change collective and co-directs, with Olivier Brossard, the research seminar ‘Poets and Critics’. His books include: Récupérer (Petits Matins, 2015); même = same (Contrat maint, 2014); Anne Waldman, Archives, pour un monde menacé (ed and tr. for Joca Seria, 2014); A partir de rien: esthétique, poétique et politique de l’infime (Michel Houdiard, 2013). With Jean-Jacques Poucel, he co-edited Contemporary critical forms, an issue of Formes poetiques contemporaines.
www.doublechange.org
http://poetscriticsparisest.blogspot.com/
In the Place of Name, Pronouns and the Poetics of Replacement.
Poetry reading / Performance lecture. ‘Pronouns® are hooks that hold onto everything, then let it all go again.’ (Morten Søndergaard, Wordpharmacy): we, the undersigned, are interested in literature as a space where nouns get hooked and unhooked, where everything concentrates and then dilates again, what Baudelaire called centralization and vaporization. ‘Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in ‘Poetry and Grammar’. We are concerned with the dance of pronouns and the poetics of replacement. ‘Do not use Pronouns® if you want to remain yourself.’ It’s a warning. From us to you.
On stage: Morten Søndergaard and Olivier Brossard.
Olivier Brossard (Paris, France) is associate professor (American literature) at the University Paris Est (Marne-La-Vallée) where he has run the Poets and Critics programme with Vincent Broqua since 2011. A member of the Institut Universitaire de France, he is currently at work on A Collective History of American Poetry and Poetics. Olivier Brossard is the American collection editor for éditions joca seria, which publishes American poetry titles in French. Recent publications include The Selected Poems of Anne Waldman (trans. Vincent Broqua) and John Ashbery’s A Wave (trans. Marc Chénetier). In 2000, with Vincent Broqua and friends, he started the Double Change collective, an online magazine and reading series in Paris. Olivier Brossard has translated many poets, amongst whom are David Antin, Keith Waldrop, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Thalia Field and John Ashbery. In 2014, he translated into French Morten Søndergaard’s Wordpharmacy, which came out to great acclaim in France. His most recent translation is John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, which was published in French under the title Le serment du Jeu de Paume by éditions José Corti in October 2015.
http://lisaa.u-pem.fr/presentation/equipes-de-recherche-du-lisaa/savoirs-et-espaces-anglophones-sea-et-groupe-des-linguistes-gl/membres-de-lequipe/olivier-brossard/
https://sites.google.com/site/olivierbrossard/
http://poetscriticsparisest.blogspot.com/
www.jocaseria.fr/Catalogue/Collection/collectionamericaine.html
www.doublechange.org
http://lapharmaciedesmots.blogspot.fr/
Entombment
Gerard Byrne uses photographic, video, and live art to explore the ambiguities inherent in revisiting the legacies of media such as theatre, photography, and magazines. By using historical coverage—an advertorial on the car mammoth Chrysler, clippings from Andy Warhol’s early Interview Magazine, a roundtable on George Orwell’s 1984 taken from a 1960’s Playboy magazine, or an English publication of a legendary interview with Jean-Paul Sartre shortened from the French original—as functional ‘scripts’, Byrne restages (often as film) the original ‘text’. Byrne’s works never attempt to transcend their textual sources. Rather, they drag the image back into the realm of the outmoded text. Footnotes, mediation, and various other textual annotations serve to further bury the image.
Gerard Byrne is a visual artist based in Dublin. In 2007, Byrne represented Ireland at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia. Other major presentations of the artist’s work include: Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; FRAC Pays de la Loire, Nantes; PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin; dOCUMENTA(13), Venice Biennial 2011, Whitechapel Gallery, London; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Byrne is a professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.
The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Nine people with an immigrant background and one policewoman have been killed, and many people heavily injured, in a bomb attack in Cologne. The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello is both a book and a performance.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (voice), Holly Handman-Lopez (dance), İpek İpekçioğlu (sound/Turkish voice), Chana Dischereit (drums).
Eklektik BerliIstan, female:pressure
Live-act / DJ. İpek is more than a solo-DJ. She performs also with live-musicians and combines traditional music elements with electronic music in her producer identity. Especially for this festival DJ İpek is inviting the drummer Chana Dischereit to join her on stage with live drumming to Ipek’s DJ-Set. LET’S DANCE!!!
On stage: İpek İpekçioğlu (DJ), Chana Dischereit (drums).
Chana Dischereit (Berlin, Germany) began drumming at the age of six, studying djembe, later tarabuka, piano, drums and tabla. She has played concerts with many different artists, mostly duo-combination, for example: djembe and sax performed with Norbert Mattes; djembe and words performed with Esther Dischereit; electronic beats performed with Steezo.
I was interested in the truth, so I began to invent it
Artist’s talk. On Before the High Holy Days the House was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings (2009) and Flowers for Otello. On the Crimes of Jena (2014).
Before the High Holy Days The House was Full of Whistlings and Rustlings & Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Where can we find the matzos now? Based on the fate of the former Jewish citizens of Dülmen, a small town in Germany. Nine people of immigrant background and a policewoman are killed by right-wing terrorists (NSU) in Germany, discovered in 2011.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (word) Holly Handman-Lopez (dance) & Ray Kaczynski (percussion).
The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Nine people with an immigrant background and one policewoman have been killed, and many people heavily injured, in a bomb attack in Cologne. The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello is both a book and a performance.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (voice), Holly Handman-Lopez (dance), İpek İpekçioğlu (sound/Turkish voice), Chana Dischereit (drums).
Esther Dischereit (Berlin, Germany) has published fiction, poetry and essays, as well as plays for radio and the stage. In 2009 she received the Erich Fried Prize. Dischereit’s work reflects the cultural landscape of post-Holocaust Germany; most recently in: Vor den Hohen Feiertagen gab es ein Flüstern und Rascheln im Haus / Before the High Holy Days the House was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings (2009), the book adaptation of a permanent sound-installation Holocaust memorial. In 2014 she published the book and libretto Klagelieder (Lamentations) Blumen für Otello. Über die Verbrechen von Jena (Flowers for Otello. On the Crimes of Jena). They are dedicated to the victims and their families of a series of racist killings perpetrated in Germany between 2000 and 2007. This work was followed by the sound installation and book Großgesichtiges Kind (The Child With The Big Face), Museumsquartier Vienna in August 2014. She is Professor of Language Arts at the University of the Applied Arts in Vienna, and in 2013 was Max Kade German Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA.
www.estherdischereit.de
www.eichengruen-platz.de
Exercises
Adam Drewes: writer. He has previously worked with performance poetry and became in 2000 Nordic champion in poetry slam—a genre he took part in introducing in Denmark. In his current practice, he often uses conceptual and performative aspects. He works both collectively and individually with new formats for developing artistic strategies. In 2013 he published the 700-page long and A4-sized book Radio. Read more about the book at: http://forlagetarena.dk/udgivelser/radio/
Border
Patrick Farmer will perform his own score, Border, by erecting a grid in the venue, which will enable him to develop notions of regulation and deregulation by moving between readings and recordings of texts he has written especially for Where Were We, and performing actions where the doing is equivalent to the sounding.
Patrick Farmer is the co-founder of the online curatorial platform Compost and Height, and the co-editor of the new-music journal Wolf Notes. Over the last three years he has published three books and has written compositions for groups such as Apartment House and the Set Ensemble. He has performed and exhibited internationally with artists such as Angharad Davies, Michael Pisaro, Sarah Hughes, and Jason Kahn. Festival appearances and residencies include Audiograft (Oxford), The Wulf (Los Angeles), LMC (London), I & E (Dublin), Geiger (Gothenberg), Blurred Edges (Hamburg), Forestry Commission England (Cumbria), Q-O2 (Belgium) and MOKS (Estonia). His work has been released on labels such as Another Timbre, Nadukeenumono, and Winds Measure. His current work looks at the nature of the arbitrary; Farmer has begun writing compositions that primarily focus on the sound producing means rather than the sound itself, often utilising more and more fantastical methods to create sounds that are themselves, wonderfully ordinary.
Dynamics of Fluids in Porous Media
A piano lecture
An investigation of the thin line which divides and connects the act of speaking to that of singing. Through the sensational ability of fever to enlarge objects and areas, the investigation takes on the task of expanding the brief moment just before the protagonist bursts into song.
The many reasons and ways for this transition to take place will be sought through an epistemological walkthrough of this specific moment as portrayed in musicals, in film and in literature.
The form itself, however, also attempts to exist in this very limited space between phonetic – meaning – emotion – knowledge.
Andreas Führer: Artist, Composer and Musician. He is a member of the Danish experimental music collective yoyooyoy. Führer works in a cross-media field between sound-art – composition – performance and installation, with an emphasized focus on their theatrical and sculptural aspects. Recent works include the song-play the question concerning technology fall of capitalism object at the National Museum of Art (SMK), Copenhagen, and the exhibition isle of white water and dreams at Kunsthal 44 Moen. Previous work includes: the participatory composition Movable Accurate (Bevægeligt Akkurat), a score-drawing-instruction piece with Rasmus Graff, Toke Tietze Mortensen, Leif Elggren, Claus Haxholm, Anders Lauge Meldgaard, Johannes Lund and Kent Tangred, performed at, among other places, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Louisiana, Humlebæk, and Aarhus Litteraturcenter; bodies for three choirs and orchestra, performed at the Venice Biennial 2011; the composition and James Joyce paraphrase, a long the 628 riverrun, past, performed at Loppen and the National Museum of Art (SMK), Copenhagen; and the records Hypnosis 7″ with Leif Elggreen (2012) and Obligatorisk Undervisning (2011).
Large Group Reading
Guattari Reading Circle is an open reading group focusing on impromptu deliveries of texts by the French institutional psychotherapist, philosopher and radical activist Félix Guattari. Established around the participation of the public, the reading circle is an itinerant function that responds to and involves the given site and particular group of its gathering. Always organized around reading aloud and on the spot (without preparation), as part of ‘The Social Body Sounding’ at Godsbanen, Guattari Reading Circle will seek to involve all audience members in a grand reading circle, thriving on the psychoanalytic method of ‘Large Group Therapy’ and its potential of amplifying diverse voicings of a collective discourse.
Guattari Reading Circle is conceptualized and organized by visual artist Arendse Krabbe and visual artist, art critic and curator Mathias Kryger, and was founded in autumn 2014. It has travelled through multiple institutional contexts, investigating the relationship between the specific spaces, the dynamics of the given group and Félix Guattari’s writing. Guattari Reading Circle has previously been hosted by the following institutions and their given collectives, all situated in the greater Copenhagen area: Kunsthal Charlottenborg; The Mental Health Center Sct. Hans; The Zoological Collection, Copenhagen University; Bispebjerg Hospital; Medical Museion; Enghave Church; AsylFestival, Trampolinhouse.
Before the High Holy Days The House was Full of Whistlings and Rustlings & Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Where can we find the matzos now? Based on the fate of the former Jewish citizens of Dülmen, a small town in Germany. Nine people of immigrant background and a policewoman are killed by right-wing terrorists (NSU) in Germany, discovered in 2011.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (word) Holly Handman-Lopez (dance) & Ray Kaczynski (percussion).
The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Nine people with an immigrant background and one policewoman have been killed, and many people heavily injured, in a bomb attack in Cologne. The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello is both a book and a performance.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (voice), Holly Handman-Lopez (dance), İpek İpekçioğlu (sound/Turkish voice), Chana Dischereit (drums).
Holly Handman-Lopez (Oberlin, Ohio, USA) grew up in New York and danced professionally in New York City for a decade after finishing her degree at Connecticut College and before joining the faculty at Oberlin College. Holly and Esther Dischereit first collaborated in 2010, when they created a dance theatre piece based on Dischereit’s work, Before the High Holy Days the House Was Full of Whisperings and Rustlings. They have performed together at numerous venues in the U.S. as well as in Germany. Holly also choreographs dance, theatre and opera pieces, and performs as a guest with Neos Dance Theatre and Shelter Repertory Dance Theatre. Handman-Lopez’s participation in the festival is made possible by the generous support of Oberlin College.
Writers‘ Inner Voices
A performance lecture with an audience interaction component based upon the Writers study, exploring how writers hear, conceive of, describe and interact with the voices of their characters. This presentation will use embedded audio and visual material (particularly the disembodied voices of writers themselves, recorded during interviews at the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2014) to reflect upon how writers use inner voice in their creative processes.
Jennifer Hodgson is a writer, teacher and academic researcher. She is currently working as a researcher on the Writers’ Inner Voices project, in collaboration with Hearing the Voice and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Working across psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and literary criticism, this project investigates the phenomenology of writing and the many complex links between inner voice and literary creativity. She has written about her findings for the Guardian and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book and a BBC College of Production podcast. Jennifer’s writing and research coalesces around an abiding preoccupation with the ‘novelness’ of novels and their distinctiveness (or otherwise). In this capacity, she is particularly interested in the British experimental writing of the 1960s, including writers such as Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke Rose and Brigid Brophy. She has written for publications including the Guardian, the White Review, the Review of Contemporary Fiction and Music and Literature. Jennifer was previously UK Editor at the international publisher of innovative fiction, Dalkey Archive Press. She is currently editing a collection of the unpublished short stories of Ann Quin.
http://writersinnervoices.com
http://hearingthevoice.org
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054pfn9
www.bbc.co.uk/academy/production/article/art20141127135622425
We Can’t Say ‘Our Body’
Poetry reading /performance lecture. Jen will perform two pieces: a poem-essay or patchwork excavation of how language is embedded in bodies and bodies are embedded in language, and a live film narration made of clips from the 1982 film Blade Runner and ongoing instances of U.S. drone warfare.
Future Somatics To Do List
Workshop. How does radical listening propel language toward an urgently restructured world? Where do bodies circulate into intimate defamiliarizations? How to reimagine our locations and dislocations radiating outward from Where Were We? Here we will trace the festival’s intersections of experience, sensation, movement, breakage, and interrelation to dream toward: a calling out to where we are and will be.
Jen Hofer (Los Angeles, USA) is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, bookmaker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena and the local language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. She publishes poems, translations and visual-textual works with numerous small presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Her most recent poetry chapbooks include Conditions/Conditioning (in collaboration with TC Tolbert, NewLights Press, 2014), we do not see what we do not see (belladonna collective, 2014), The Missing Link (Insert Blanc Press, 2014) and Front Page News (Little Red Leaves Textile Editions, 2013). Her most recent translations are a bilingual version of Intervenir/Intervene, by Mexican writers Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and Amé.RICA, a book by Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas (Litmus Press, forthcoming). Her latest homemade books include i copy your copy, (collaboration with Franciszka Voeltz, DIY edition, 2015), Denotative Skies (DIY edition, 2013), and a series of five bilingual pamphlets (three manifestos and two how-to guides in collaboration with John Pluecker, Libros Antena Books, 2014).
antenaantena.org
antenalosangeles.org
http://jacket2.org/commentary/jen-hofer
www.thevolta.org/ewc51-antena-p1.html
http://theoffendingadam.com/issue/183/lucas/
http://alligatorzine.be/pages/101/zine127.html
https://publicaccessjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/public-access-3.pdf
http://bombmagazine.org/article/7220/from-i-less-than-one-more-than-one-i
Yes, But Is It Edible?
Some years ago, Will Holder and Alex Waterman proposed to the American composer Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his experimental operas. Yes, But Is It Edible? resulted from that proposal, a book which includes notations for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These (semi-autobiographical)
operas were developed through oral instruction and negotiation between Ashley and his ‘band’ (Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert), singing in landscapes (technological, imaginary, acoustic, organizational, sonic, ocular) produced by ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans and Mimi Johnson. The operas were the result of a 30-year relationship and, as such, ‘scores’ weren’t written for this informal readership. It hadn’t been considered that anyone outside the ‘band’ might produce this work.
Holder and Waterman’s book is made to be collectively read aloud. In Aarhus, they will perform selected parts, chanting the crossing story lines (of old age, everyday life, loneliness, love, remembrance, radio tunes) in a swirling rhythmic chase.
A Last Futile Stab at Fun
For some years, typographer Will Holder has been reproducing the work of American composer Robert Ashley, both on and off the page. Here he reads a lecture whose sole instruction is ‘to be sung or chanted’. The text, originally called The Meanings of Modernism, was authored in 1979 for the Walker Arts Center and is concerned with involuntary speech, audience participation, the reproduction of cultural anxiety, and ‘fourness’ as an organizational principle for memory.
Typographer Will Holder organizes writing around reproductions of artworks, and in particular how voices from various disciplines are mediated to provide meaning and access to art objects. He sees conversation as a model and tool for a mutual and improvised set of publishing conditions whereby the usual roles of commissioner, author, subject, editor, printer and typographer are improvised and shared, as opposed to assigned and pre-determined. Based in Glasgow, Holder is editor of F.R.DAVID, a journal concerned with reading and writing in the arts (since 2007). In May 2009 he co-curated TalkShow (with Richard Birkett) at the ICA, London. In 2014 he began a series of exhibitions, HIGH ENERGY BAR, at Grazer Kunstverein, Austria; and was Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds throughout 2013. His work is currently shown in the touring British Art Show (2015–16), and he has recently received a Paul Hamlyn Award.
The Social Body Sounding
This talk will centre on a phrase taken from a redacted conversation between Robert Ashley and John Cage in 1961. In that conversation Robert Ashley expressed his interest in producing a ‘music that wouldn’t necessarily involve anything but the presence of people…’ As he continues, ‘It seems to me that the most radical redefinition of music that I could think of would be one that defines “music” without reference to sound.’
Waterman’s scholarly and artistic practice over the last decade has been grounded in a practice that he has referred to as the ‘social act of reading.’ Through collaborations and conversations with Will Holder, David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey, Beatrice Gibson, Shannon Ebner, and the late Robert Ashley, he has explored how we organize sounds while those sounds are always already at work organizing us. He has questioned how experimental poetics and notation might be used to generate other forms of social and cultural production.
What does music organize if its primary objective is not the organization of sound?
Alex Waterman is a cellist, composer, and musicologist. He was a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London. His duo with choreographer and improviser Michael Schumacher was featured in the Lyon Biennale, Holland Dance Festival, and recently in the Strut Festival in Perth, Australia. As a sound artist his installation works have been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Serpentine Gallery, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and the Bonnefantenmuseum. He has produced three books with Will Holder: Agape, Between Thought and Sound and most recently their book on Robert Ashley: Yes, But is it Edible? (New Documents, 2014). Alex has scored and co-directed several award winning films including A Necessary Music, which won the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2009. He has also written soundtracks for the films/videos of Shannon Ebner, Cameron Gainer, Ricardo Valentim, and Allen S. Weiss. Waterman was an artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial where he directed three operas by Robert Ashley. He has taught at New York University, the Bard College MFA programme, the Banff Centre for the Arts. This year he is a Visiting Professor of Music at Wesleyan University.
ECHO’S
Presentation of ECHO’S, Aviary Press Editions, 2015
Andreas Vermehren Holm (b. 1988), writer and editor at the publishing house Forlaget Virkelig and Bestiarium. Works as a translator from Norwegian, Swedish and English. Since 2015 editor of Ny Jord – tidsskrift for naturkritik. Published in January 2015 Palimpsest at the publishing house Aviary Press Editions and, in May 2015, Antropocæn kreatur at the publishing house House Of Foundation.
teXere
A reading from the ongoing text project teXere. teXere consists of a group of texts all linked to one another by reflecting upon a failed art project and its implications. Thematically, it speaks about the process of creating art and the writing of the text itself. Through reflections on art and literature, it speaks about desire and longing both in relation to another person and to the project itself.
Franziska Hoppe (b. 1990) 2012-2018: The School of Time-based media at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
Séance de lecture
Séance de lecture investigates the physical manifestation and the performativity of a book. Looking subjectively at the never-realized project of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé Le Livre (The Book), this work explores the relationship between text and word, speech and act, the materiality of writing and reading, as well as the expansion of pages once manipulated, re-read and spoken. It operates as a partial reconstruction of Mallarmé’s project, based on Hurth’s thorough research of his manuscript. This work has been generously supported by FNAGP (Paris).
Dominique Hurth is a visual artist living in Berlin. In the formats of exhibitions, editions and readings, she is interested in the framing, telling and recording of historical events. She has exhibited in institutions across Europe and the United States (a.o Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; MAMO Cité Radieuse, Marseille; After the Butcher, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck; Liverpool International Photography Festival; Hordaland Art Centre Bergen; Wildt’sches Haus, Basel; Haeler Echo, NYC) and has received several grants and fellowships such as, more recently, the Berliner Senate Grant for ISCP, New York. She publishes frequently in the format of artist books and pamphlets. Current projects include a new body of work on the occult and poetry, through the lens of Stéphane Mallarmé, which is supported by FNAGP (France) and manifests itself as a series of performances and sculptures in 2015.
The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Nine people with an immigrant background and one policewoman have been killed and many people had been heavily injured in a bomb attack in Cologne. The Songs of Lamentations and Flowers for Otello is both a book and a performance.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (voice), Holly Handman-Lopez (dance), İpek İpekçioğlu (sound/Turkish voice), Chana Dischereit (drums).
Eklektik BerliIstan, female:pressure
Live-act / DJ. İpek is more than a solo-DJ. She performs also with live-musicians and combines traditional music elements with electronic music in her producer identity. Especially for this festival DJ İpek is inviting the drummer Chana Dischereit to join her on stage with live drumming to İpek’s DJ-Set. LET’S DANCE!!!
On stage: İpek İpekçioğlu (DJ), Chana Dischereit (drums).
İpek İpekçioğlu (Berlin, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey) As dj/producer/curator, İpek İpekçioğlu has developed herself into an exclusive Berlin export article, visiting festivals and clubs all over the world: New York, the desert Sahara of Mali, Salvador de Bahia, Stockholm, Marseille, Los Angeles, Istanbul, Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg, Glasgow, Cairo, Sana’a or Shanghai. She has toured in Spain with Ojos de Brujos and has made exclusive tours throughout China. In Stockholm, queer-living DJ İpek is much longed for as annual host DJ at the RE:Orient festival. The Swedish queer magazine QX pronounced her the hippest DJ in Europe, and Londoners seem to agree because in the World Beat DJ Competition at Electrowerkz in 2005 they voted her the winner. Undisputedly, DJ İpek İpekçioğlu has earned herself a reputation in the heterogeneous landscape of international nightlife, with her traditionally flavoured music from Turkey, Middle Eastern and Balkan countries melting together with electronic music. Free of conventionality, without boundaries or borders and refusing to be limited by style or tempo she blurs the lines between cultures and genres.
‘ or what I wanted to say for a long time’
In ‘ or what I wanted to say for a long time’ Naja Lee Jensen explores the relation between word and body. With a background in theatre and performing arts, she is interested in what kind of spaces language and bodily presence can create.
Naja Lee Jensen’s work is interdisciplinary. Educated with a BA in Acting from Norwegian Theatre Academy and an MFA from the Art Academy in Oslo her works often explore the relation between the body and the perception of a place/a situation/another person/a text. She is interested in knowledge beyond reason. Her works have been shown at Festspillene in Bergen, Black Box Theatre in Oslo, HAUT in Copenhagen and Novi Ganz Novi Festival in Zagreb.
A Silent Life
A reading about mimicry, which takes shape as a collection of examples using images and voice. Mimicry as a way of learning, achieving intimacy and asserting oneself. Mimicry as strategy and method, but also as a civilizing exercise. The possibilities of ‘whole-hearted mimicry’. In other animals, mimicry is often an attempt to avoid falling prey to predators. However, it does not always offer protection, rather it opens up for new ways of becoming prey: ‘Mimicry is an incantation fixed at its culminating point, having caught the sorcerer in its own trap.’ (Roger Caillois in ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia’ (1935).
Currently a Masters student at the Art Academy in Oslo, Nora Joung works with different media, including video, montage, text and objects. Interests are, amongst others, strategies for communication, power and language.
Mother’s Tears
An essayistic reading, which explores different ways of relating to images, drawing on the recent scientific discovery of the mirror neuron and its potential effect on our understanding of reality and consciousness. Suffering from vertigo, the narrator sets out to investigate the origin of this condition, especially how it relates to her mother’s fear of heights.
Line Kallmayer is a Danish visual artist and writer. She works in an intersection between disciplines and methods, primarily with film, text and photography. She has a fine arts degree from Goldsmiths, University of London as well as a degree in English and Psychology from the University of Copenhagen. She studied at Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Art Photography, and attended a one-year traineeship at the Polish National Film School in Łódź.
Before the High Holy Days The House was Full of Whistlings and Rustlings & Flowers for Otello – On the Crimes from Jena
Performance. Where can we find the matzos now? Based on the fate of the former Jewish citizens of Dülmen, a small town in Germany. Nine people of immigrant background and a policewoman are killed by right-wing terrorists (NSU) in Germany, discovered in 2011.
On stage: Esther Dischereit (word) Holly Handman-Lopez (dance) & Ray Kaczynski (percussion)
Ray Kaczynski (Berlin, Germany) born in Detroit, Michigan USA. Percussionist, composer and ITstrument (sound sculpture) performer. Ray Kaczynski performs on international tours through Asia, Europe and the USA. His current projects include: wordmusik (with Esther Dischereit), ‘On the road to Detroit’, The SoundCruschers, SOLOX ‘The IT and the WHAT’, and his Quartet, ‘Working Birds’.
Equivocus
What does interest earn? For whom and how do you figure? This space was sought as ransom for these and other words, to hold what they alone cannot: things, being things, and words, being words, and all things and words evidently not being equal. In others’ words, shedding a pejorative meaning that connotes ambiguity, slipperiness, even deception, ‘equivocal’ might suggest instead a balance of utterances: the Equi-Vocal, the equal or equivalent voices. Through a number of advents this autumn—an invitation to speak, a commission to write, requests to lead a symposium, a student workshop, and a panel, as well as a series of voice lessons—all accumulating towards this festival, Angie Keefer has pondered her voice as something other than a means of utterance. You’ve registered your domain, now put it to work.
From a Window
The first stable photograph still exists but isn’t visible. Originally commissioned by Witte de With in Rotterdam and recently re-presented as a talk ‘on voice’ at Artists Space in New York, Angie Keefer’s lecture, ‘The View from the Window at Le Gras,’ considers the reproductive ambitions of images by way of illuminated words, following a brief detour through a solid rock wall.
Where Were We
is a phrase, a question, a shop sign, and a title conceived over the course of a years-long conversation between Kara Hamilton and Angie Keefer for a weeks-long exhibition at Kunstverein, Amsterdam, which opened on November 29, 2013, the same day a text called Where Were We was published to correspond. The text, which has since become a talk, takes as its starting point a certain shop sign and the gown it depicted—a draped dress fashionable in the early 1700s—, and proceeds from there through cameos by Stéphane Mallarmé (as an editorial team of noms de plume), and other notorious actors in various guises, their assorted economies reshuffled by Keefer.
Angie Keefer remembers visiting the childhood home of Helen Keller in north Alabama some years ago. Behind the house sits a permanent stage set of the house where the story of Keller’s early life—her breakthrough from silence and ignorance into language—is regularly reenacted. Keefer, an artist, teacher, publisher, sometime-performer and writer, is currently at work on a script for a play called Sensitive People that is set on this stage and probably about it. She is co-founder of The Serving Library, a non-profit artists’ organization dedicated to publishing and archiving in a continuous loop; and co-editor of The Bulletins, their bi-annual publication. She has recently exhibited, staged, taught, published, spoken, or otherwise produced work at Kunstverein Munich; Liverpool Biennial; Whitney Biennial; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and São Paulo Biennial, among others, and is currently exhibiting at Greater New York, MoMA PS1. She graduated in Sculpture from Yale University. She teaches listening at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and lives in rural upstate New York.
Wave Forms and Tunnel Visions
Wave Forms and Tunnel Visions is a sound performance that builds upon recorded material from a disused iron mine and an ancient necropolis in the area of Cagliari, Sardinia. The work reflects on the subterranean in connection to property relations and histories of absence.
Signe Lidén is an artist based in Bergen. Her installations and performances explore man-made landscapes and their resonance. She is interested in how places resonate, in memory and matter, through narratives and as ideological manifestations. Her work ranges from sound installations and performance to more documentary forms such as sound essays and archives. Lidén made the sound and video work krysning/conflux for the Dark Ecology project (2014) and the installation series Writings for the European Sound Art Network Resonance (2013-14). She collaborated with Steve Rowell and Annesofie Norn on The Cold Coast Archive (2010-12), an exhibition series on the Global Seed Vault launched at the Centre for PostNatural History, Pittsburgh, and has been commissioned to make works for Hordaland Art Center, Kunsthall Oslo, Ny Musikk, Touch Radio, and Interferenze New Arts Festival.
Two Portraits – A Performance
MonoMono will do a performance that takes its point of departure from the record Two Portraits released earlier this year. The appearance will consist of both improvised and noted moments and it will also bring acoustic and visual parameters together.
On stage: the composer Lars Carlsson, the writer Fredrik Nyberg and the cellist My Hellgren.
MonoMono (Gothenburg, Sweden). The group was founded in 2004 by the composer Lars Carlsson and the writer Fredrik Nyberg. Since 2010 the cellist My Hellgren has also been a member. MonoMono works with text/sound compositions, a Swedish tradition that they develop in different ways. The group combines text/voice, cello, interactive electronics, light and projections. They have performed at different venues both in the music and poetry scenes in Sweden and abroad. MonoMono’s CD ADSR was awarded ‘Nutida Sound’ in 2012 by the journal Nutida Musik, on the grounds that it is one of the ‘most interesting albums within innovative music.’ In 2015 they released the album Två Porträtt (Two Portraits).
Material notes: Read as Woven
A reading of unravelled and rewoven text-printed paper.
Aislinn McNamara: I am interested in writing in relation to mark-making and language in relation to ‘description’—expression—including how humans and non-humans are in different environments and their methods of communication. Recently, I have explored the history of writing and mythology, including human beings’ attempts at imagining the unimaginable or describing the indescribable and ascribing and inscribing meaning to matter. This sometimes manifests itself as rubbings and ‘automatic writing’ texts.
How Does the Poem Sound? What is a Poetry Reading?
Poetry reading /performance lecture. What is a poetry reading, what can it be. Words. Sound. Body.
Two Portraits – A Performance
MonoMono will do a performance that takes its point of departure from the record Two Portraits released earlier this year. The appearance will consist of both improvised and noted moments and it will also bring acoustic and visual parameters together.
On stage: the composer Lars Carlsson, the writer Fredrik Nyberg and the cellist My Hellgren.
Fredrik Nyberg (Gothenburg, Sweden) is a writer and researcher. He had his debut in 1998 with the poetry collection En annorlunda praktik (A different practice) and has since published another six collections of poetry. In 2013 Nyberg was awarded his PhD with the artistic doctoral dissertation Hur låter dikten? Att bli ved II (How does the poem? Becoming Firewood II) at the University of Gothenburg. Nyberg’s latest collection of poems—Slingorna & undergången. Att bli ved III (The Loops and the Destruction. Becoming firewood III)—was published earlier this year.
Echoes
Echoes is a performance about a perpetrator of violence, the confession of this violence and the strategies he developed. In this performance, set in Argentina during the 1976-83 dictatorship, Patracchini plays the role of a doctor, a mourning father whose daughter, the audience deduces, has been kidnapped and has disappeared. Alone on stage, the protagonist desperately narrates his grief and pantomimes the last moments of a family scene that takes place on a Tuesday afternoon, just before his daughter is forcibly taken from the family’s living room.
Nearing
‘Walk as near as required. So near that, at an inclined point, the distinction converts the essential.’
Patracchini will be walking around the room/space interacting with various small objects and a pre-recorded sound.
Christian Patracchini is an artist, writer and curator working across performance, text-based work, sound and drawing. His practice explores a code of gestures that investigate their potential and modes of existence in relation to their own privation. In recent years he has worked collaboratively with performance artists, musicians and writers, and has taken part in exhibitions and festivals such as: BIOS Festival, Athens (2009); PAE Festival, Rotterdam (2010); Colloquium Festival, School of Speech and Drama (2011); Dimanche Rouge, Paris (2012); Month of Performance Art, Berlin (2013); Tempting Failure, Bristol (2014); Writing Sound 2, Bergen (2014). In 2013 he founded Flows, a series of events focused on text-action practices.
A review of man in time and space
A performative presentation with visuals inspired by a series of conversations between Rasmus Brink Pedersen and Christian O. Knudsen, a candidate for participation in the manned Mars-mission planned by Mars One. Christian is preparing his body for prolonged space travel. He considers his body a sort of battery, to be charged before lift-off, and at the same time a vessel for scientific study. It takes 210 days to travel from the Earth’s orbit to Mars’ orbit. The Transit Vehicle is very small and will have to meet all the needs of the four astronauts for the entire trip. The Transit Habitat will be abandoned before landing on Mars as only the Lander can make it to the planet’s surface—it’s a one-way trip.
Rasmus Brink Pedersen (born 1979, lives and works in Copenhagen) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. He has been investigating and taking part in collective projects, as part of the group YNKB (Outer Nørrebro Cultural Bureau) and as co-editor of the magazine visAvis. Recent projects include the collectively authored disaster novel Samlemappe no. 1 (2013) and the exhibition Friendships at Kunsthal Aarhus (2015). He works in several media: installation, video, drawing and as a writer.
Vagina Eating Husband
The short story Vagina Eating Husband deals with issues concerning pregnancy, reproduction and parenthood in a grotesque and mythological way. The text is the voice-over for a short video work with footage of a snake eating a rat slowly.
Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen (b. 1977) is an artist, currently living and working in Aarhus, Denmark. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, 2004. Through a range of media, such as video, text, photography, drawing, and object-based installations, Lyngkær Pedersen examines the various ways in which we understand our identity and make sense of our surroundings. Her practice often revisits themes from science and theories of perception. In 2013 she finished an artistic research project on Synesthesia with the artist book Why is Green a Red Word? (2003-2013). Lyngkær Pedersen has taken part in several international residency programmes and exhibitions, most recently including Trauma & Therapy, Paphos Archaeological Museum, Cyprus (2014/15), Sorry For Laughing, KN Gallery, Berlin (2014), ‘Synesthesia 4 / Translating, Correcting, Archiving’ at Art Laboratory Berlin, Germany (2013). She has furthermore been engaged in a number of long-term collectives and curatorial projects, including The Production Unit, HOMEWORK and the exhibition space rum46 in Aarhus.
Simulating Authenticity: The Conceptual Poetics of Kenneth Goldsmith and Sophie Calle
From its inception a decade or so ago in the U.S., conceptual poetry has rejected not only the expressivist lyric but also the dramatic monologue—the poem that tries to get inside another person’s consciousness. Relying on appropriation, citation, copying, mashing, pasting, the conceptualists have collaged material that is patently not their own, their ‘voices’ are designed not to function as individual voices but to create new awareness of the world as they have found it. The difficulty, as we have witnessed this past year in the outcry over Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Body of Michael Brown, occurs when poet and subject are taken as one and the same so that Goldsmith was vilified for attempting to get ‘inside’ the body of the recent police victim, Michael Brown. Or, to take the opposite case, when the material appropriated is too obviously presented as a set of values the performer himself or herself is opposing, the audience may well lose interest. How can these extremes be avoided? How can conceptualism establish complexity and difference? I will discuss some of Goldsmith’s own earlier work, Christian Bök’s Xenotext and Sophie Calle’s Prenez-soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself)
Marjorie Perloff (Los Angeles, USA). Before her retirement, Marjorie Perloff was Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California, was recently named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University and is the recipient of many honours. She is the author of many books on 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, including: Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977); The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981); The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994); Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996); 21st Century Modernism (2002); and, most recently, Unoriginal Genius: Writing by Other Means in the New Century (2010). She has also published a cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004) and her new book, forthcoming in early 2016 is Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. A collection of interviews and essays was published by University of Chicago Press in 2014, under the title, Poetics in a New Key. In 2012, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania honoured her with a special symposium; a varied set of the individual contributions to that symposium appeared in the online journal Jacket 2.
http://jacket2.org/commentary/celebrating-marjorie-perloff
http://marjorieperloff.com/
notes for soloists and l’usage du mot
Poetry reading.
Cia Rinne (Berlin, Germany) is a poet and artist and writes visual, acoustic, and conceptual poetry in different languages, and collaborates on performances and sound installations. Her publications include the books zaroum (Helsinki 2001), notes for soloists (OEI Editör 2009), both published in volume in France (zaroum et notes pour solistes, Le clou dans le fer, 2011), should we blind ourselves and leave thebes (H//O//F 2013), and the sound piece sounds for soloists (in collaboration with Sebastian Eskildsen, 2012). Her work is also shown in museums, most recently at INCA Seattle, Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen, Bielefelder Kunstverein, and at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn.
When Everything Falls Apart, You Will Have To Put It Back Together…
(six voices / six recordings)
A half-hour sharing of six voice-based recordings, along with their histories and/or contexts.
The Clouds As if (Chapter 2)
A one-hour reading of a chapter from The Clouds As If—a book in progress—exploring a small group of Polaroid photographs taken by my father in the 1970s. As the images and people are unknown to me, the photographs have simply become ‘idea generators’. Chapter 2 is particularly rooted in an exploration around sound technology and the loss of a voice. The presentation will also include sound and video recordings.
‘In 2007, I received a small box of things that belonged to my father, including a small group of Polaroid photographs. The photos were taken in the early 1970s, when my father moved to Alaska for a year. As I looked over the images, I realized that I was unable to recognize any of the people or locations. There was something about the Polaroid that sparked an idea of trying to write about them – partially because my father gave me a book of Andy Warhol’s Polaroids in the early 1980s, while also finding inspiration in a small paperback book of Polaroids taken by the director Andrej Tarkovsky. For several years they sat in my desk drawer until I decided to try to use them towards trying to write about these objects that became more talismans than family heirlooms. Because I am a visual artist and also working a lot with sound, the photographs have led me to write not only about images but sound, and sound histories, as well. The ‘reading’ will also include video projections and sound.’
Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles, living in Pasadena. His work includes painting, drawing, sculpture, film/video, sound installation, text and performance. Roden’s working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self-invented systems into scores, which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions, failures and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon.
In the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as colour choices, number of elements, amounts of time and form building. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or possible landscapes. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden has described as lower case—sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
Sugar is Not a Vegetable
‘Leaves in grass and mow potatoes, have a skip, hurry you up flutter.
Suppose it is ex a cake suppose it is new mercy and leave
charlotte and nervous bed rows. Suppose it is meal. Suppose it is sam.’
– Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, Claire Marie, 1914
A reading and performance revolving around vegetarian food.
Roger von Reybekiel is a Stockholm-based artist and curator whose individual and collaborative projects explore the artificial distinctions between art, life and the everyday. Most recently, his practice has examined the use of text in artistic processes and digital developments in contemporary art and literature. Previous exhibitions and projects include Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Baltic Art Center, Visby; and Entrée Visningsrom, Bergen, among others. His latest book Seven Pears in a Line was published by Flamme Forlag in Norway in 2013.
Third Personism – The FBI’s poetics of Intimacy in the 1960s
Talking from his prolific current investigation and soon to-be-published book, Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research, Lytle Shaw will discuss Third Personism. From the heyday of the tape recorder as a poetic tool and means, this notion points to how 1960’s poetry, on the one side, becomes influenced by ‘stress, intonation, access, timing’ (all functions often dismissed in print) – a ‘personism’, famously coined by Frank O’Hara as a poetics of intimacy – while, on the other side, the potential of the technically ‘mediated voices’ was in parallel part of a new era in which (poetic or political) utterances were always already overheard, surveyed, meaning that the really intimate listeners-cum-readers in the early 1960s were the FBI. Focusing on the listening and being listened to, Shaw analyses how such tapings provoke a different, potentially quotidian, paused, mediated voice.
Lytle Shaw is professor of English at New York University and a contributing editor for Cabinet magazine. His PhD from the University of California, Berkeley became the book Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), which tracks interactions between postwar poetry and art while theorizing O’Hara’s model of coterie as a paradoxically democratic mode of writing. Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (2013) considers poets including Williams, Olson, Baraka and Mayer as experimental ethnographers and historians. A collection of recent art essays is forthcoming as Specimen Box. Written for institutions including DIA Center, Reina Sofia, De Hallen, and Whitechapel, these essays track the changing terms of institution critique over the last 25 years.
We all suffer from Capitalism, but refuse treatment
We all suffer from Capitalism, but refuse treatment is a text work and a manuscript for a play. The work emerged out of an original idea to stage Marge Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time from 1976 and juxtaposing it with Revolt and Crisis – Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come (Dimitris Dalakoglou and Antonis Vradis eds. (2011)). Doing so facilitates discussion of potential future scenarios in a field where fiction and fact intersect. The play in one act was developed and staged in collaboration with dramaturg Gritt Uldall-Jessen and is published as a booklet by Antipyrine.
Lise Skou (1966) is an artist, curator and teacher from Denmark, informed by post-capitalistic politics and economic cultural criticism particularly by the work of J.K. Gibson Graham. Skou’s art practice engages with multiple mediums—video, performance, texts, interventions, and activist strategies among others. Her work can be seen as an ongoing investigation into various connections between: practical rethinking of economic structures; the subject of revolution; people’s movements and individual empowerment. Through her practice, she envisions non-capitalistic economies and tries to show a landscape of economic diversity. She holds an MFA from Funen Art Academy (1998-2004) and she studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art – Independent Study Program (2002-2003). She also holds a BA in Art History from Aarhus University. Skou has shown internationally for the past ten years. She was recently represented at Systemics#3 at Kunsthal Århus, 2014. In 2010, she co-wrote and edited with Andrea Creutz, the book Swop Projects, based on the project of the same name, discussing the possibilities for producing and communicating economic practices outside of capitalist discourse. From 2005-2007, Skou worked at the Institute of Sociology, Copenhagen University, teaching on the course ‘The Artist as Sociologist’, in collaboration with Andrea Creutz.
In the Place of Name, Pronouns and the Poetics of Replacement.
Performance. ‘Pronouns® are hooks that hold onto everything, then let it all go again.’ (Morten Søndergaard, Wordpharmacy): we, the undersigned, are interested in literature as a space where nouns get hooked and unhooked, where everything concentrates and then dilates again, what Baudelaire called centralization and vaporization. ‘Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in ‘Poetry and Grammar’. We are concerned with the dance of pronouns and the poetics of replacement. ‘Do not use Pronouns® if you want to remain yourself.’ It’s a warning. From us to you.
On stage: Morten Søndergaard and Olivier Brossard.
Praxis
Poetry reading.
Wordpharmacy / Praxis
Workshop. Morten Søndergaard’s Ordapoteket is a combination of medication and grammar – but also a work that in many ways invites the user into its universe. During the festival Where Were We, the word-pharmacist will open up a practice. Join a consultation every day between 1.00 p.m. and 1.30 p.m. with Søndergaard, where you can be prescribed a drug or a work that might cure your disorders. This linguistic practice is intended as performance and is complemented by an exhibition during the festival.
Morten Søndergaard (Paris, France and Pietrasanta, Italy) is one of the foremost Danish poets to emerge onto the scene in the early Nineties. Søndergaard’s first collection of poetry, Sahara i mine hænder (Sahara In My Hands) was published in 1992. This debut collection has been followed by a succession of works, which have won him both critical acclaim and a number of literary awards. Language is Morten Søndergaard’s medium and his métier, which he practises not only as a poet but also as a translator, sound artist and literary editor. And while his craft is solidly rooted in the classic poetic tradition, he is constantly intent on exploring the possibilities of language and new ways in which these can be presented. Over the years, alongside his written publications, this has resulted in musical and dramatic works and in recordings, exhibitions and installations centring on language, materiality and sound. Morten Søndergaard has been translated into a large number of languages, and his work Wordpharmacy has been exhibited all over Europe.
Unspeakable Intimacy
‘during the isolation period my thoughts were sticky with beingsthe body degraded every day decomposing in its own sight so there was some comfort in knowing that these entities were becoming the bodywould live on even after death there would be no death only a change of state’.
Professor David Toop – London-based composer/musician, author and curator – worked in many fields of sound art and music, including improvisation, sound installations, field recordings, pop production, opera, theatre and dance – published five books, including Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance – released nine solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Black Chamber and Sound Body – curated exhibitions include Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, Playing John Cage at Arnolfini, Bristol, Blow Up at Flat-Time House – University of the Arts Chair of Audio Culture and Improvisation – currently writing Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom.
Materia Oscura
In his collection of thoughts on medicine, The Silence of the Body, Guido Ceronetti tells the story of an astrophysicist who could finally perceive the ‘great cry’ emitted from the abysses of the Universe: a heartbreaking lament of countless helpless wounded beings, an indecipherable ‘SOS from the unreachable, an endless ocean of vocal entities without hope.’
Inside my body does there lurk a space-crystal of this Universe, with its plethora of lamenting beings and infinitude of voices raised in messages without purpose? In fragments of shipwrecked words, which I call and which call to me, I give to it my delirious mouth: not to save, not to know; perhaps only to exorcise, to eject this Universe in pieces—if it is in me.
Valerio Tricoli is a composer and performer of electro-acoustic music. Since the mid 2000s his main instrument for live presentations is the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue / ergonomic device for live sampling and real-time transformation / editing / mixing of pre-recorded (field or studio recordings) and made-on-the-spot sound sources, the latter usually being vocalizations (including speech and singing), small acoustic and electronic instruments, objects, the amplified sound of the room itself in which the concert takes place.
Tricoli’s sets focus on the impromptu creation of a narrative, which takes into account the multiple relations intervening between reality, virtuality and memory during the acoustic event: sounds are always hovering between the ‘here and now’ of the concert situation and the shady domain of memory—distant but at the same time present, like in a déjà vu experience. By privileging fracture over continuity and by the use of a dynamic range that can often jump suddenly from near-silence to extreme blasts of sounds, an almost tangible feeling of brooding tension is attained. His electro-acoustic studio compositions, documented on only a few records, are aligned to the tradition of Musique Concrète and explore themes of the internal—represented both by the psychological and the physical—and of the occult, which together with the large use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within. His latest release Miseri Lares (PAN) has been described as an ‘album which reads like a story full of provocative signifiers, which converge to create an allegory of unsettling beauty’ (Mischa Mathys, The Formant).
HOW TO GV
A manual
HOW TO GV: A manual is a performed dialogue between a set of layperson fingers and a machine just built by the fingers, Geometric Vagina (GV). The fingers spend their days engaged in various forms of precarious digital labour, but GV has other ideas about ways they might leverage their talents.
Ida Marie Hede is a Copenhagen-based writer and art historian. Miranda Trimmier is a New York-based writer and editor. Ida and Miranda share a fondness for feral bodies and cyborgian misbehaviour. They’re interested in the moments where mechanized life glitches out and fails, and the ways that people court and participate in such ruptures in their everyday lives. Ida’s and Miranda’s collaborative writing project HOW TO GV is their very first attempt at working together and might therefore (/hopefully) contain some alluring glitches.
A New Valve
In this hour-long performance Wilkes will explore aspects of inner voice as he interacts with an ‘experimental system’ of images, texts and recordings assembled from ongoing research concerns. These include translations of Renaissance chansons, psychological paradigms designed to investigate intimate experiences of daydreaming, the archives of an experimental interwar health centre, and embodied encounters with visual artworks.
James Wilkes writes poetry and makes installation and performance work. He is Associate Director of Hubbub, an interdisciplinary team exploring rest and its opposites as the first recipients of the Hub Award at the Wellcome Collection. He has performed his work at Battersea Arts Centre, Arnolfini, Liverpool Biennial, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Poetry Parnassus and Ca’Foscari University of Venice. He is the author of Weather A System (Penned in the Margins, 2009) and Reviews (Veer, 2009), and his work has featured in The White Review, Dear World and Everyone In It, Litmus, and Torque 2. A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.