Performing the Techno-Imagination

Action II: Hunger for Pictures

Scene I: Magellania

31 May 2016, 7-9pm

Index- The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation

Developed by curator Rowan Geddis and artist Love Enqvist, in collaboration with choreographers Sara Gebran, Caroline Byström and composer Lisa Holmqvist.

This staging will take as its starting point Magellania, an expanded film essay by Stockholm based artist Love Enqvist. The film explores the lapse between image and language through a complex web of relationships, both present and historical, that touch upon Isla Navarino at the southern tip of Patagonia. Struggling with the impossibility of accurately reading ‘images’, ones that are personal, historical, cultural or imagined, this scene will adopt a number of strategies in order to surmount this ‘gap’. Through various protocols of delegation, processes of mediation, translation and abstraction, and through a series of workshops in advance of the event, the initial materials of Magellania will be re-read and re-configured, giving them new form.

Magellania intertwines narrated moments of darkness with silent footage to tell the story of Cristina Calderón, the last speaker of the Yaghan language, whose death will close off a part of history to us. Attempting to rethink the colonisation of language and image, suggesting that ‘silence is not passive’, Magellania is, amongst other things, a meditation on affect and the dialectics of modernity.

“This is a story of an attempt to recreate/re-find a memory. A memory of a diving woman.
The screen, imagined or real, is here the place of mediation.
The staging of an appearance as disappearance.
My search for this involuntary memory has turned into an investigation and a quest for her. The diving woman. The ghost in me. The ghost of history.”
Love Enqvist, 2016

Hunger for Pictures is a wider program developed by curator Rowan Geddis, which explores our relationship to image production, consumption and distribution in a ‘post-historical’ age. Scene one explores the ‘image’ as the space of overlap between memory, perception and history, whilst considering how the technical image, in its various mediated forms, imbricates our collective historical and cultural consciousness. Hunger for Pictures is the second action related to an the ongoing research project entitled ‘Performing the Techno Imagination’, which conjures the late philosopher Vilém Flusser’s concept of the ‘Techno Imagination’ in order to consider artistic and performative strategies in engaging with and reading ‘that which is beyond us’. This research is given form through a series of actions, each exploring a certain position to, or reading of, these perceptual proposals, whilst aiming to explore the potential of the performative in a process-focused mode, a ‘live’ thinking through activity.

 

Performing the Techno-Imagination

Action I: Reality Production

Scenes 1-3 : Tai Shani (London) Luisa Ungar (Bogota) Isak Sundström (Stockholm)

23 March 2016, 7-9pm

Tensta Konsthall 

Reality Production is a programme exploring the role of (and connection between) mythmaking and the performative in the construction of the ‘real’.

Considering devices of storytelling and mythmaking as acts of resistance, and as speculative and critical tools, this programme questions whether we have come as far from myth as we might think. Countering the conjecture that fantasy, mythology and the mystical equate to regression, a step back into a state of  ‘pre-enlightenment’ or represent the escapist and ignorant, this project instead explores the function of a new ‘mythic-consciousness’ for a contemporary age, myths potential for generating new models for reality and perhaps even as a strategy in overcoming the ‘straits of human consciousness’.

Reality Production is the first in a series of stagings related to an ongoing research project- Performing the Techno Imagination. These actions intend to explore the potential of the performative in a process-focused mode, a ‘live’ thinking through activity. By conjuring the late philosopher Vilém Flusser’s concept of the ‘Techno Imagination’, this project considers artistic and performative strategies in engaging with ‘that which is beyond us’.

“there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything”

Nietzsche -On the Genealogy of Morals

 

Pre-scene

“SUBTITLES”: Five Dramas of Swollen Emotions for Music and Voice

Isak Sundström

For Reality Production Sundström will premiere a new sound/text work developed for this occasion. Based on four films by Douglas Sirk, Sundström’s “Subtitles” comprises five ‘Speech-plays’ that explore the extreme emotional potential of the filmic space. The basis for these works are the subtitle texts from Sirk’s films that describe the sound effects and incidents that take place off-screen (clock chimes, knock on door, man crying etc). This extracted periphery texture follows the films dramaturgy but creates a new dissolved narrative, to which Sundström has inserted certain key descriptive anchors. This performance of filmic spatiality, becomes a ‘non-story’, an ‘other’ space, through which to explore the role and limits of the imagination in the creation of meaning.

 

Scene I

Willing Suspensions of Disbelief 

Luisa Ungar (Bogota/Amsterdam)

For Reality Production Luisa Ungar has produced a lecture performance exploring ideas surrounding the language of transparency and ‘that which is not directly seen’. The staging looks at the notion of opaqueness as an image of resistance, and uses as its main metaphor the Axolotl, otherwise known as the Mexican Salamander, a strange neotenic amphibian that has the rare trait of retaining its larval features throughout its adult life (reaching sexual maturity without undergoing metamorphosis). The talk takes this animal as a mechanism of contrast to put light on some of the issues outlined above.

 

Scene II

Our Only Hope is to Give Up Hope (adaptation)

Isak Sundström (Stockholm)

For Reality Production Sundström will perform a manifesto: a new adaptation of a staging from an ongoing project. of Our Only Hope is to Give Up Hope, an analogy of a movement, a paradoxical image of a united ‘WE’. In short, the movements foundation, which can be seen as a kind of consciousness, can be described as a unification of loss and confusion, a resignation of personalities, a questioning of love as an instrument of power, a sort of anti-struggle, a search for a point zero, a nothing.

 

Scene III

Dark Continent: Mnemesoid

Tai Shani (London)

Dark Continent Productions is an on-going project that proposes an allegorical city of women populated by composite, symbolic protagonists that embody excess and examine ‘feminine’ subjectivity and experience, as well as the potentials of a realism defined by excess and the irrational, qualities traditionally surrounding notions of “femininity”.

For Reality Production Shani will premiere the latest staging in this series, Mnemesoid:

“Both narrator and Oracle at the end of civilization, mnemesoids in the voids hold both genome and memory databank in its entirety gathered during the eternal cortex project. A ceaseless algorithmic invocation of a concluded history, a complete ark. Mnemosoids, neither woman nor man nor animal nor object, devastatingly beautiful hive mind but yes, flesh generating, yes, desire feeling, multiple users within a high fidelity memory replay. Then flesh recedes into the singular synthetic networked particle and they return as hive mind.”