Multiplayer - Softenings and Inquiries into Matters of Toxoplasmatic Ectoplasm
(2024)
author(s): Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
This project investigates Western musical instruments as being critical and even dangerous sites, which should be approached with the greatest of caution.
Approached as liminal interfaces between the living and the dead, suspended between past(s) and present(s), turning these instruments into both paranormal and parasitic sites, which should be treated as such.
Instruments as pathological contaminated bodies of parasitic discourse ready to jump at you and embed themselves in you, sedimenting within you and, subsequently, playing you.
Instruments as haunted sites saturated with ghostlike matters of toxoplasmatic ectoplasm, fostering ghosts with the capacity to possess and inflict pain on to other bodies, active in the past as well in the present.
With an interest in the notion of instrumentalization and what instruments can mean, control, and do to bodies, instruments are approached from a safe(r) distance through different (group) interventions, raising questions on how best to emolliate and soften the instrumental body?
How to soften the big silent? How to soften the sedimented?
Sticky currents: Drawing folds in serial exhaustion
(2015)
author(s): Nicole De Brabandere
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
The affective qualities of surfaces (and the skin) in drawing operations, wedging clay, and video are developed in this research exposition by activating them with both the concept and the practice of exhaustion in emergent series. The practical and conceptual framework emerges along side Deleuze's 'The Fold', Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the 'smooth' and the 'striated', and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's 'The Undercommons'. The images, videos, poetics, and concepts of the exhibition develop folding textures and generate charged affective worlds with the force to modulate habits and attunements. As these emergent worldings intensify an emergent corporeal, they also activate a research process that continually folds over and across itself, opening up to new affects, concepts, and subjectivities. Folds exhaust themselves in the multiple, unspeakable midst, until the gentle vibration sparks a current and starts to resonate the fine hairs on the surface of the skin so that they again become sticky.