DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE
8 November 6:30 – 9:30 pm
Audio of the Performance
“If you hold a stone, hold it in your hand
If you feel the weight, you’ll never be late
To understand”
(song by Caetano Veloso)
Words, as stones, are the result of very long processes of sedimentation. The fluidity of language becomes material when we think of it through different temporalities. A sentence, observed in a long curve of time, is the synthesis of the transformations of time and displacement, and when looked at from very close, it is a solid rock that has accumulated the weight of established narratives of history, of habits and culture, traumas, memories and dreams. Inverting this arrow, minerals can be seen as the syntagms of a land that hold on their combinations, compositions and dissolutions, the multiplicity of the untold and unseen stories of a place.
Reconnecting to practices in performance and video, the body in displacement, articulates the materiality of words and minerality, reflecting upon language and geology as long-duration-choreographies.
This exhibition is thought as a durational sculpture-performance developed in collaboration with the artists Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki and Petros Lolis, composed by videos, sculptures and a dance.
For the production of these pieces, we allowed ourselves to experiment with a series of different practices, guided by the interest of thinking minerals not only as the material to work ON but as a material to work WITH. This way, stones became collaborators in the choreography of our gestures. As we kept company with each other, the minerals made themselves more and more visible on the structure of our everyday life. Fundamental for the construction of our way of living and dying, for the development of our ideas of progress and technology, the minerals are also populating our imagination and help us build our subjectivity through narratives they incite, carry or announce. A stone, as a piece of a bigger rock, the planet, as a trace of a very distant past or a recent souvenir you keep on your shelf. Minerals as protagonists of a series of myths and as the moving fuel of the global economy, extracted from the ground, triggering historical movements of exploitation, colonization and violence.
Image credits Nuno Cassola and courtesy of the artists.
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