the arrival of a new publication as a form of spatial occupation, as well as the promise of an imminent form of distribution

Alessandro Bosetti - A Collection of Smiles presentation April 2, 8pm

Chatting inside the Monad : notes on a "A Collection of Smiles".
by Alessandro Bosetti

What happens when we talk to each other ? Behind the meaning. Behind the words. Behind the people themselves. What is that reticular tangle, map or rhizome we call a conversation ?

What happens when a small group of individuals find themselves in an isolated room and have a totally casual, unprompted verbal interaction ?

"A Collection of Smiles" is an acoustic portrait of such a situation - trivial and precious at the same time - intended as a monad, a self contained space where everything lives within, already encapsulated, already implied.

Several people, some already acquainted to each other, some not, are left alone in a room in front of microphones. They are not told what to talk about, they have an hour of time. Voices are recorded separately so that they could thereafter be cut, spliced, repeated, reorganized in different and ever changing constellations.

Afterwards speech is not only reorganized but also progressively transformed into musical material. Spoken phrases are transcribed into pitches and melodic profiles and arranged and re-composed for a small chamber ensemble with guitar, oud, contrabass-clarinet, violin, piano and celesta.

In this process words and phrases turn themselves into melodic progressions. Infinite recombinations are possible. Counterpoint is the perspective and the motor. The relations between the speakers - that could even be though about as a polyphonic vocal ensemble performing ready-made spoken madrigals and motets- are contrapuntal . The relation between melodic phrases and progressions in the instrumental ensemble is contrapuntal. The relation between spoken phrases and their melodic shadows played by the instruments is contrapuntal.

Speech and its instrumental shadows face themselves as in a mirror. Melodies and their spoken aliases claim a primacy that's hard to establish. The antiphonal game of imitation between speech and music continues indeterminately as in the infinite bouncing of reflections between two mirrors placed one in front of each other.

What are those individuals talking about ? It's nothing special, really.

Such a simple conversation is the stuff of everyday talk wrapping around reality and itself in a circular and enclosing movement. It is something we know all too well. Is what we just did a short time ago while been talking to the last person we met. We surely have been talking about something, no matter what, just something...

This conversation is - and re-tells - the utterances of our social existence. Small talk. Not so important and at the same time all that there is.

Small talk is neither small nor big. It is undimensional and rather stretchable. Small talk, big talk, we always keep ourselves busy by telling something. We fill the space with our important or negligible words. Most of times - when we don't do it - somebody else does it. When nobody else does it there are good chances that we are alone. Thats is why we always keep up the talk in an enactment of "aboutness" that wraps itself around reality like a warm coat.

There are cases in which we pull the words apart stretching the space between them. This crevice is always a loaded territory and the theater of tension. Likewise, when we pull two words apart the space between them is miraculously filled up by other words as if those always have been there. An implied and hidden texture unfolds when we try to make the knots of language looser. I believe this often becomes apparent in "A Collection of Smiles"

The acoustic space where this all happens is closed and - in a Leibnitzian perspective - has no windows, just an infinite net of internal implications and textures ready to unfold. As in a baroque painting, where no background is visible - and the light seems to come from within - no sounds from the outside world have been used. No field recordings, concrete samples or ambiances are there to comment, integrate or signify the meaning of words. Where the concrete world should be are instruments as placeholders, totems, abstract interval-machines.

In several pieces I've dedicated much attention to the sonorous potential of speech and language. So far my focus has been monophonic : speech is what "somebody says". Still no language is possible if there is no interaction. In language's nature is inscribed that I should go from an emitter to a receiver - even if the receiver is an imaginary one - and somehow exist in the empty space between the two.

In "A Collection of Smiles" it has been my intention to observe, capture and portrait the acoustic manifestation of language as something that happens in between. Between multiple people, multiple voices, multiple mouths.

A relation rather than a fact, tension between- rather than an object itself-.

One speaker says : I am smiling again.

Another answers : I can hear it.

Berlin, February 2011.

Setting for an Open Source No. 1

The Setting is an open participatory situation where visitors contribute to a collective writing action. A set of laptops are located within an installation, connected to projectors, allowing visitors to write, to witness others’ writings, to read what is happening. The writing is freely directed by curiosity, questioning, fictions and speculations aimed at stimulating thoughts on the contemporary condition of “public intimacy” – common strangers, overhearing others, sharing here and there. It is imagined that a series of silent collaborations will unfold within the writing gesture, as one visitor writes while also witnessing what others are writing; one may read what others write and may feel inspired to counter, to balance, to interject; or writing might act as a form of diary, capturing the moment and giving voice to the present. The Setting may become a durational space, an open source for materializing a temporary meeting and multiplying narratives around commonality, publicness, artistic strategies, global culture, intimacy.
January 28 - 30th, 2011

Manual for the construction of a sound - event

with
JD Zazie - performance
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec - Reality Soundtrack, radio transmissions and score
Ella Klaschka & Alice Muench - deconstructed room

Manual for the construction of a sound - book launch

Book launch event for the publication –
Manual for the construction of a sound as a device to elaborate social connection

Friday, September 24, 8pm

With works and performances:
JD Zazie
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Brandon LaBelle















Errant Bodies
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin

In celebration of the new publication from Errant Bodies Press, participating artists Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec and Brandon LaBelle will present related sonic and interventionist works. The event will also include a special performance by Berlin-based artist JD Zazie.

*

Manual for the construction of a sound as a device to elaborate social connection
Edited by Brandon LaBelle
Errant Bodies Press: Surface Tension Supplement No. 4
ISBN: 978-0-9772594-8-9
104 page + CD

Organized as a temporary working group, the Manual project set out to explore sound and auditory experience as platforms for social meeting, urban intervention and environmental investigation. Developed in collaboration with Atelier Nord and the Ultima festival and staged in Oslo in 2009, the project brought together six artists from around Europe engaged in experimental media practices. The project functioned as a series of process-oriented field studies of the city, involving locational research, performative actions and public discussion. Such an approach aimed to use sound as a process of temporal and social exchange. The works involved supplemented objective perspectives with face-to-face interactions, secret interventions, and transmissions so as to bring forward amplifications of city life.

The publication includes artistic works and materials by Siri Austeen (Norway), Brandon LaBelle (US/Germany), Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec (Slovenia/Holland), Kristina Lindström & Åsa Ståhl (Sweden), and Jana Winderen (Norway).

Further essay contributions by curators and philosophers Federica Bueti, Sophie Gosselin & David gé Bartoli, and Stine Hebert.

Artist Talk with Margit Leisner

Monday, August 23, 8pm

Please join us for an evening presentation by the artist Margit Leisner. Margit will share her recent projects and research, related to contemporary curatorial practices.

Margit Leisner is an artist from Curitiba, Brasil. She co-organized the festival of experimental voice work, Poéticas Experimentais da Voz, Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói, and also Arte em Circulação, an intensive gathering on the question of interventionist practices in Brasil, both in 2008. She is currently in residency at the FLATSTATION in Bijlmer, Amsterdam.

Opening Event - July 30

Reception Party Summer Action /
or the making of space...

Come along for drinks to celebrate our new working space-project room
Friday, July 30, 20:00
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin

with works and interventions
by
Riccardo Benassi
Federica Bueti
Brandon LaBelle
Annette Stahmer