OO

Organa Organicum (I)

Komuna Warszawa

20/12/2024, 19.00

Barbara Kinga Majewska i Michał Libera - koncepcja, libretto, dźwięk
Łukasz Sosiński - obraz
Piotr Cichocki, Agata Stanisz, Monika Żyła - konsultacje naukowe

Organa Organicum pomyślane jest jako seria esejów audiowizualnych na temat wykorzystania materiałów zwierzęcych i roślinnych w budowie instrumentów muzycznych. Historia tych ostatnich pełna jest martwych zwierząt i roślin. Są tu żółwie, których skorupy pełnią funkcję pudeł rezonansowych; konie, z których włosia robi się smyczki; owce, których jelita służą do produkcji strun, a skóry - membran instrumentów perkusyjnych. Jest ich więcej. Dużo więcej. Nie inaczej jest w przypadku liści, krzewów czy drzew - świerki Stradivariusa są tylko jednym z wielu przykładów. To one wszystkie w dużej mierze decydują o tym, jak brzmi muzyka. Współdecydują. Być może więc w samym dźwięku fortepianu czy skrzypiec da się usłyszeć jakąś formę życia po życiu roślin i zwierząt. A nawet jeśli się nie da, to z pewnością można w nich usłyszeć złożone relacje między ludźmi, naturą i technologią. Także dziś, kiedy muzykę robi się z materiałów niemal wyłącznie syntetycznych.


20 grudnia w Komunie Warszawa zaprezentowany zostanie pierwszy epizod Organa Organicum. Poświęcony będzie fortepianowi, kości słoniowej i hebanowi oraz wszystkiemu temu, co za nimi idzie: kolonializmowi, kłusownictwu, dystynkcjom społecznym ufundowanym na idei sztuki wysokiej, a w szczególności muzyki klasycznej z jej zamiłowaniem do detalu, wirtuozerii i „opanowania” instrumentu. Narracyjną oś pierwszego epizodu stanowiła będzie historia przytoczona w książce „Hunter’s Tracks” autorstwa Johna A. Huntera. Legendarny organizator safari (a także pierwowzór męskiego bohatera „Pożegnania z Afryką”) opowiada w niej o tajemniczym kliencie, który na kongijską sawannę przybył z własnym fortepianem. Wbrew osłupieniu, w jakie wprawiło to wówczas Huntera, dziś wybór instrumentu wydaje się przynajmniej symptomatyczny. I temu wyborowi poświęcony będzie wieczór w Komunie Warszawa.

Organa Organicum będzie serią filmów. Na okazję premiery przygotowana zostanie prezentacja z elementami performatywnymi oraz wprowadzeniem teoretycznym.

Paweł

Audio travelogue 

(for field recordings and voice)

19/10: Miasto Literatury, Gdańsk

20/11: Komuna Warszawa 

21/11: Audio Art, Kraków 

22/11: Biuro Dźwięku Katowice 

25/11: To Pikap, Thessaloniki 

26/11: Nekubi, Kavala 

27/11: Stellage, Athens 

30/11: Desibel, Istanbul 

„Paweł” is an audio travelogue, a half-phantasmagoric, half-mocumentary depiction of rivers, canals and sewage, whether en route towards water reservoirs, or upstream, towards their often inaccessible sources. The piece consists of eight scenes, or rather eight encountered landscapes. Together they form a not very logical and not very conclusive story about water dams and locks, abundance and floods, dry lakes and stony riverbeds, as well as everything they hide and reveal. It is also about the rhythm in which they perform this work. Actually it is mostly about that rhythm.

„Paweł” is based on field recordings made with homemade geophones, hydrophones and contact microphones. This choice means that the landscapes in „Paweł” are not soundscapes, nor do they resemble spaces as we usually hear them. Little comes here in the perspective of human ears, yet these recordings are absurdly real - the editing is minimal, there are barely any effects, practically no overimposed drama. What really makes „Paweł” are juxtapositions of different takes of a given landscape at a given time - simultaneous, although arbitrary, seemingly overscaled, perhaps disproportionate.

The field recordings in „Paweł” are accompanied by a voice reading the text - something between travel notes, outline of a lecture on social history and a curatorial narration explaining the nature of the sounds heard. Facts, anecdotes, myths and everyday observations definitely reveal something here, but they probably hide even more, especially since there are so many quotes - or rather crypto-quotes. The only exception is a lengthy fragment of Robert Ashley's libretto entitled „The Mystery of the River”, a rarely performed part of the opera „Atalanta (Acts of God)”.

Massive thanks to Nicolas Malevitsis and Volkan Terzioğlu

Concerts in Greece and Turkey supported by Adam Mickiewicz Insitute

VANISH SE24-T1

 

VANISH SE24

curated by Michał Libera and Konrad Smoleński

scores by Anton Lukoszevieze

Tour 1

or rather Anti-Tour with scores mounted on the flanks of the van, to be interpreted in the following towns, by the following artists:

13/07: DOM, Riga (Latvia) - Liene Rumpe, Lidija Zaneripa, Kristers Krūms (all artists are part of DOM gallery team) 

15/07: Suomenlinna (Finland) - Annika Fuhrmann

16/07: Kemiö, in front of Kulturhus Björkboda (Finland), 16.00-17.00 - Isto Rahkila, Antti Tolvi

19/07: Mooste (Estonia), 19.00 - John and Evelyn Grzinich

20/07: Strenči Sonification Station (Latvia) - Orbita Group 

21/07: Galera / UMI, Vilnius (Lithuania), 20.00 - Kristupas Gikas aka DJ Extended feat. Kazimieras Jušinskas

more details to come

VANISH is a mobile art gallery housed on the flanks of a MB W903 vehicle. The van serves as a canvas for paintings, drawings, screenings, but primarily as a platform for meetings and discussions with artists, collectors, curators, and the general public.

In the third season, main themes and inspirations will come from music and sound art circuits. From music, VANISH will borrow communication tools. First, the score. It will be pasted on the side panels of the gallery, where visual art works were in previous seasons. Second, VANISH will go on tours - one of the most emblematic ways of spreading music. However, the gallery will not serve as a means of transportation for travelling musicians. Equipped with the score, it will move from one location to another in quest for artists willing to interpret it in the gallery. Performances will be meticulously documented - audio and video - and published as a bootleg album of the tour, the third hint to the music world.

VANISH will also learn from sound art, especially from its attention to the physicality of the detail. In the first place - detail of the room. There is a long tradition of sound art investigations into acoustics of galleries. Sizes, shapes, surfaces, angles, materials - physical aspects of the room are not merely contexts of sound pieces, they are integral parts of their sonic content. In the third season we want to hear how all these acoustical features work in a gallery room that has four wheels, engine and a camshaft. We also want to find ways to document this sonic life of the gallery in a manner that would do just to its materiality. 

Bringing it all together makes the concept for this season of VANISH clear. It cannot be anything but circumnavigation. Going in circles. Loops. The gallery circles around Europe. The sound bounces around the gallery’s pipes, electric circuits and body. The score keeps on being interpreted again and again. We carry on following the details of these envelopes. In physics, circulation seems to encompass random vectors that emerge when the main current is being examined. We try to do the same.

SIXTEר in NYC

   

SIXTEר (edit)

Performance for quiet reading

e-flux NYC

Launch of e-flux journal #144 

incl. Throat on Brain. Magic and the Art of Memory in Robert Ashley's Operas

​Event with Arto Lindsay, Ben Vida and Amy Gernux, Kimberly Alidio, David Grubbs, and Daniel Muzyczuk

11/04/2024

172 Classon Ave

Brooklyn, NYC

What is SIXTEר? Could be a six-pack caught at a gas station, of course. Could be a sexophobic hipster either. Or a musical sixth ending with a tail falling to the right. It can be various things, in fact anything, whatever you want to hide behind it. Because it is all about hiding. The word itself comes from the dictionary of Sergei Pankejeff, one of Sigmund Frued's most important patients. He created words in order to mislead the Viennese neurologist. This silent reading performance is about those words. And also about Pankejeff's mouth, about the history of printing and shorthand, about masturbation, deafness and Akkadian stone inscriptions, about wheezing, wolf-men in general and the tail dragger in particular. However, all these threads are only barely able to conceal a meditation on #metoo and reactions to the growing content of performativity in the air around us, to fake news, to overpopulation, to healing therapies, completed and unfinished, successful and unsuccessful. To the pandemic too? To the pandemic too.