Sounding Out Vacancy: Performing (anything but) Empty Space
(2019)
author(s): Julieanna Preston
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition translates the intentions and experience of the 2014 performance Sounding Out Vacancy as a piece of spatial writing structured by four voices operating in unison to contest ‘emptiness’ as a condition of interior space. The seven-day performance occurred in a street-level urban central business district retail shop that, like many other ‘for lease’ properties in the city, had stood empty for several months. Its glass façade obscured from view, the performance broadcast sounds continuously from the interior space to the general public as an alternative advertisement of the shop’s availability. During the nine-to-five work day, sounds were harvested from the interior where construction hand tools and material surfaces interacted as a process of virtual renovation. While the city slept, the ambient sounds of the space persisted and put the shop’s vacancy into question.
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.