Documents, Alternatives:
a symposium of artistic process and practice,
curated by Angela Bartram.
20 April 2018
Bath School of Art and Design
Following previous iterations at project space plus, Lincoln
and Verge Gallery, Sydney, Australia, ‘Documents, Alternatives (#3)’
is an exhibition that includes time-based works that rely on performative
process and created experience, where both the document and artwork operate
reflexively. Accompanying the exhibition at BSAD, a half-day symposium will
open the nature of artistic process to critical debate. The exhibition and
symposium will include new iterations of the 'project' The Italic I -
a collaboration between myself and artist Clare Thorton - including video-based
work, publication and performance reading.
The Italic I: Between Liveness, Language and the
Lens
Emma Cocker & Clare Thornton
In this
performance reading, Cocker and Thornton stage a dialogue between the visual
and textual documents produced within their artistic collaboration, The Italic
I. Within The
Italic I, the studio is approached as a gymnasium or testing ground for purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated
fall, which is slowed
and extended through the use of both language and the lens. The live
performance of falling is willfully not shared with an audience; instead, this
enquiry focuses on the specificity of experience communicable in the mediation
of performance through its documents, both photographic and linguistic. We ask,
firstly: How do we attend to the experiential nature of falling rather than
documenting it only as a visual event? How can we present the fall as a force
rather than simply representing its form? How might we communicate the
qualities of passage and the multi-, micro-temporal dimension of falling?
Secondly, how can we develop a mode of linguistic expression — an alternative
poetic textual document — that embodies rather than describes the live
experience that it seeks to articulate? How can language document an
alternative encounter with falling, the ‘free-fall’ experienced within the process
of dialogic exchange? Thirdly, what alternative modalities of performance and
performativity — what emergent temporalities and subjectivities — arise through
the reactivation of our performance documents? What is at stake at the
threshold where liveness, lens and language meet, in the gap or interval
between performance and its mediation, between event and document?
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