Danica Maier, Score, 2022
performance with punch card, two hand-cranked music boxes, projection; 30'' extract of the 20' performance
Score was created from an iterative process of transposing the drawn lace lines within a historical lace draft onto a programmable music box punch card. Key ideas of transposing, encoding and re-encoding were explored through first ‘naively’ transcribing the original data of the lace patterns into lines before inscribing them into a continuous line on the punch-cards. Talking about making Score, Maier refers to processes of appropriation, copying and repetition as well as the kind of slow, immersive looking of ‘the translator’s gaze’ (Campbell and Vidal, 2019). Score saw Maier producing several re-drawings of the historical lace draft, which she describes with the term ‘unrepetition, … a kind of iterative variance, something that is the same, but is not exactly the same’. For her, translation offers an opportunity to investigate one material method through another, here exploring lace through line drawing, sound and performance. The translational process of removing material from its original context into another allows her to understand it in a different manner, eventually enabling her to ‘get to the core of the material’ even if only to realise that 'the core shifts'.
still image from the projection, showing the original piece of lace and the score with Maier's iterative, palimpsestic drawings
Cinzia Delorenzi, Ospitare/ Hosting Others, 2022. Curated by Gaia Del Negro and Silvia Luraschi, Video by Filippo Michelangelo Ceredi, 2022
Video, 6 min
In 2021 and 22 education specialists Gaia del Negro and Silvia Luraschi designed a series of three workshops in collaboration with artist and choreographer Cinzia Delorenzi. This drew on Del Negro’s and Luraschi’s research into somatic experience and the centrality of the body to learning and built on an earlier performance by Delorenzi for which she interpreted two poems by Antonella Anedda through dance and a complex network of threads. The performance, the poems and the threads became the material for the workshop in which participants were invited to explore somatic and artistic expression as ways of knowing. Filmmaker Filippo M. Ceredi joined the final workshop in the Parco di Trenno in Milan in spring 2022. Rather than documenting the project, the artist and his video camera entered into a participatory relationship with it, emulating gestures and movements with the aim of translating somatic experience into audiovisual language. During the workshops Delorenzi described and re-enacted elements from her earlier performance with the aim of making it accessible to the group. Concepts like copying, repetition and appropriation were central to Ospitare/Hosting Others where they were explored above all through the body. For Delorenzi translating experientially means connecting vision with language through matter.
Sounds of Isolation combines composed music, spoken word and field recordings to reflect on the life situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work also includes a parallel visual text. A sound art workshop held with students at the University of Debrecen (Hungary) in October and November 2021 formed an important part of the creative process. During the workshop participants were asked to use words as single descriptors of feelings as well as narration. Here Katschthaler was above all interested in sound, i.e. in how words or narratives were recited, in pitch, tone, voice. In the composition, words and narratives are mixed with everyday sounds recorded in workshop participants’ homes as well as with sounds the artist had recorded in the empty university building during lockdown. Both in the process of creating the piece as well as in the final work, sound overrides the more literal content of words. Katschthaler explains how sound provided a more direct way of allowing students to remember and to share their memories of lock-down. The final artwork gathers the different memories, voices, experiences and translations and remixes them into an oppressive, repetitive and, at the same time, hypnotic acoustic atmosphere, which must be experienced in isolation, but which can also be seen as shared.