Citational Fragments

Rimbaud

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(Illuminations XIV: Les Ponts) [The Bridges]

Grey skies of crystal. A bizarre design of bridges, now straight, now curved, and others descending in oblique angles to meet the former, and these patterns repeating themselves in other well-lit windings of canal, but all so long and weightless that the shores, weighted with domes, sink and contract. Some of these bridges are still covered with hovels. Others bear masts, signals, frail parapets. Minor chords interlace, and fade; ropes rise from the banks. You distinguish a red coat, other clothes perhaps and musical instruments. Are those popular airs, snatches from noble concerts, the remains of public anthems? The water is grey and blue, wide as an arm of the sea. A white ray, falling from on high, annihilates this comedy.

Text quoted from http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Rimbaud2.htm#_Toc202067626

Image reproduced from http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/rimbaud-evil/

Place Making > Placing Self

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Heidegger’s Hutte, Todtnauberg, Black Forest, Germany

“…place is that open, cleared yet unbounded region in which we find ourselves gathered together with other persons and things, and which we are opened to the world and the world to us. It is out of this place that space and time both emerge, and yet the place at issue here also has a dynamic character of its own – it is not merely the static appearance of a viewed locale or landscape, but it is rather a unifying, gathering, regioning – place is, in this sense, always a “taking place, a “happening” of place.”

Malpas, Jeff, Heidegger’s Topology, Being, Place, World, Massachussets Institute of Technology, 2008, Chapter 5 Place and Event pp.221. Image reproduced from http://faslanyc.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/landscape-delicatessen.html

Between being and becoming

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negative space

Negative Space © Denise Startin

‘As Stuart Hall reminds us, identity is a matter of becoming as well as being:

It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything that is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’  of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.’

Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea, Writing, Photography, History, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: 2001, pp.79

Spatial Architectonics

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Loie Fuller

Loïe Fuller, physical poet, 1862-1928

“Space – my space – is not the context of which I constitute the ‘textuality’: instead it is first of all my body, and then it is in my body’s counterpart or ‘other’, it’s mirror image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other. Thus we are concerned, once again, with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations, Yet, through and beyond these various effects of meaning, space is actually experienced, in its depths, as duplications, echoes and reverberations, redundancies and doublings up…”

Text reproduced from The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell Publishing UK, 1991: pp.184

Image reproduced from http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/search-the-collections/287807 where you will also find more information on Loïe Fuller

Dangling Modifiers & A Curious Love Letter, Micro Performance Lectures, Ragley Hall

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Dangling Modifiers & A Curious Love Letter, Micro performance Lectures, Warwickshire Open Studios, Ragley Hall, Warks

Dangling Modifiers & A Curious Love Letter, Micro Performance Lectures, Warwickshire Open Studios, Ragley Hall, Warks

 [Briefly she enters another’s space becoming a site of inscription like the blank page…
he advances towards her with short, sharp stabbing motions. Can she subject her
sensuous gesture to his nervous tic? Following the curve of her S she drops down
heavily into its base disappearing from his line of site. She sways at the bottom before
rising and finds that he has become a woodpecker, his nervous tic feverishly
inscribing the trunk of a tree.]

“Dangling Modifiers” is the textual re-performance of a physical performance. High on a hilltop in the Lake District Denise engaged in an improvised choreography attempting to dance with the artist Paul Klee (1879-1940); to coax the performer’s body and Klee’s silent drawing into speech . Klee’s rhythmic line is expressive, lyrical, poetic and figurative evoking transcriptions of music. “The letter is not directed to the body; the line however, exists only through the echo it will encounter in other bodies where it will generate itself as a danceable volume, polyphony, scene, texture, at palpitating fingertips…” [1]. Positively performing a Kleeché  (taking a line for a walk), Paul Klee’s Drawing Knotted, 1920 was utilised as the performative score translating the drawing into movement by falling, jittering, twisting, snaking, weaving and shimmying on a hilltop like a deranged walker.

“Echo who cannot be silent when another speaks. Echo who cannot speak at all unless another has spoken. Echo who always answers back.” [2]

A Curious Love Letter is equally a failed attempt at speech, letters of love to an absent and unreachable addressee, based on an original reading of a performed letter at which Denise was absent. Separated by distance, time, space and location Denise has ventriloquised the original speakers voice into her own, reconstructing and miming the unheard text. Other voices and figures have been incorporated including artists Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian & Michael Craig-Martin and literary figures such as Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and Fernando Pessoa. The result is a polyphonic word and image divigation and a very curious love letter indeed.

Dates & Times: Saturday 5 th July 2pm & 3pm, Sunday 6th July 2pm & 3pm – Saturday 12th July 2pm & 3pm, Sunday 13th July 2pm & 3pm.

[1] Jean-Francois Lyotard, Driftworks, Semiotext(e), Inc, (Columbia University: New York, 1984), p.86/87.
[2] Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1997), p.75/77.