A JOURNEY TO NOTHINGNESS
My new essay Journey To Nothingness is based on the movie Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and is part of the anthology ‘The Hinge of the Metaphor’ - A collective essay on cinema published by Vanguard Editions
TYSTNADEN
Tystnaden is a trilogy of works: a text, a performance and a sound piece that takes Ingmar Bergman’s Silence as its starting point. The film centers around miscommunications on multiple levels and deals with the difficulty of creating meanings or perhaps finding or determine meanings. In the mind of Bergman, God is silent as his previous film established, because there is no god in reality.
Tystnaden rather than merely stating ideas about God, alienation and miscommunication, puts them into action. These sounds offer us little freedom of invention, yet they became deformed and exposed to many formal rules originating a shifting dialogue that has the confused and illogic appearance of life. The human murmurs, sighs, snivels, loud chewing, shouts and hard swallowing, create fluctuating and unrecognisable noises suggesting a regression to a state of arbitrary vocalisation. With the loss of expressive language (a support), we are left to make do with the mystery that is reality. What remains to us, in the end, is only our own voice.
Caught between hopes and doubts Tystnaden carefully balances questions and paradoxes such as: If metaphysical questions are hopeless why do we keep asking them? Is God a clue to the travel and travails of truth rather than the truth of assertion?
AGAINST THE WRITER’S PERFORMANCE
(AN INTERIOR REALISM)
For writers to be able to read well their own work in front of an audience it is nowadays more than ever an essential part of their practice. Writers are expected to perform and read meaningfully their work. They have to be out there. It is not surprising that such “performance” has become a highly visible - one might almost say emblematic - art form in the contemporary world, a world that is self-conscious, reflexive, obsessed with simulations and theatricalization in every aspect of its social awareness…
VARIATIONS
Almost a being without boundaries, spared and more purely inner, very strangely tender and illuminating itself up to the edge, is such a thing known to us? Let us consider the sense of variation. Our skin could be called variety, in a precise topological sense; a thin sheet with folds and plains, dotted with events and singularities and sensitive to proximities…
(Variations was commisioned by MarsdenWooGallery in response to the exhibition Lexicon by Alida Sayer – Photo)
SHADOW MAN
One day I noticed that what I was writing concerned him more and more and though in a indirect manner, it seem to have no other purpose but to reflect him. He had assumed a strange ascendancy over me in all these things. Sometimes I was wondering if he was trying to restrain me at all the costs.
I spoke of him but it gradually became a completely different feeling, a sort of erosion of the future…
Shadow Man is a text written in order to celebrate the work of David Bowie and it has been presented at a night of reading at BrixtonBookJam
http://www.brixtonbookjam.com/readersspeakers/#sthash.ijve492B.dpuf
SEVEN KINDS OF SILENCES
During my recent residency in Atina (Italy), I wanted to make a study of the silences of the local library, view on the valley, museum, church and historic buildings. I became inspired by the dimensional and introspective power of these spaces when empty. Late in the evening or in the very early morning, when little noise is produced by everyday life, these spaces still possess their own sounds, be it the tick of a clock, a door opening, or even a distant conversation; each sound within the acoustic space reveal a strong sense of time and space. I wanted to convey an experience of these spaces, by describing what I thought was surrounding my body. I sat whilst with my eyes closed in seven different buildings and spaces, recording my impression of each by speaking into a recording devise the description of the sound which I guessed by listening to what, according to my senses was happening in these spaces. I have transcribed the recording and printed it on paper.
Atina (Italy) August 2013 Colour.it artists residency