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“Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake somewhere else, so that every man is in fact two men.”
Jorge Luis Borges
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Filed under Non-linear states …
HOY! LA VIE NOUVELLE
Buena plática, buena pelÃcula, buenos mezcales: no hay mejor forma de pasar un jueves.
Entrada gratuita.
(Labor, Interior13 Cine y Tóxico Cultura invitan)
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 041: REDUCTION
¨The problem with a shot like this, if you want to know, is getting it done.Most of us begin with a cliché – not always, but most of the time -and that´s fine, but you have to look at it from all sides and clarify it.
So you start with the idea of discovery……
…Showing a mountain without the window, without anything.
A torn curtain
Then you ask yourself, but why?
It will inhibit the viewer´s imagination instead of opening it up and you say to yourself:
¨yes, after having filmed Mount Etna, Mount Saint Victoire, why add another one?¨
And so you renounce, slowly.
Then one fine day…
One fine day you realise that it´s better to see as little as possible.
You have a sort of…reduction, only it´s not a reduction – it´s a concentration and it actually says more.
But you don´t do that from one day to the next. You need time and patience.
A sigh can become a novel.¨
- J.M Straub
(Gracias Michel Lipkes)
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 035: VOLCANIC RESTRAINT
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“Igor Stravinsky loved expressing himself and wrote a good deal on interpretation. As he bore a volcano within him, he urged restraint. Those without even the vestige of a volcano within nodded in agreement, raised their baton, and observed restraint, while Stravinsky himself conducted his own Apollon Musagète as if it where Tchaikovsky. We who read him listened and were astonished.”
-Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern-
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NON-LINEAR STATE No. 14: BARE FAITH AND OTHER HUNGRY FRAGMENTS
“I see things that are impossible to believe and experience people and situations that permanently misplace my previous knowledge constructs. And losing my conceptual frameworks and assumptions is not unlike losing the backpacks upon immigrating to Israel. I possess nothing more than a temporary understanding. And I’m unexpectedly grateful.
If I tried to control reality by making sense of it, by needing certainties and truths, I would miss all that is invisible and obscure and overlook the fluid places where magic lies. I gather my knowledge in fragments, and when they begin to form into a solid, singular piece, I break them apart by the introduction of another fragment. When the fragments crash, it sounds like heavy metal played by forest creatures in leather dunce caps and frayed silk wings. It’s haunting.
I call on us to experience the joy of relinquishing the judgments we’ve made. Let’s fight when we want to surrender and surrender when we want to fight. Let’s live as a deranged creature, hungry for the unknown, repeatedly ripping up plans and blueprints to see what emerges from nothingness, from bare faith. ”
–Anita Doron, Filmmaker–
From her great TED Fellow talk, murmured from stage in a way that was deliciously transfixing, and did derange.
(Gracias Anita)
TÓXICO PROJECT ARRIVES IN CUBA
One morning, hunting the Mexico City flee markets, I came upon a small battered suitcase that caught my eye. When I opened it up I was surprised to find it full of old photographs, negatives, postcards and other personal mementos from the 30s and 40s. There was a whole story to be woven, image by image: I could tell that the original owner was both an amateur photographer and also an amateur physicoculturist; I could easily imagine that this suitcase kept a certain (nameless) young man’s favorite pictures, plus dozens of self-portraits in different stances and under different guises. I was mesmerized by all that was there to be inferred, and also wondered about how such a suitcase ended up in a stranger’s hands. It made me think of the story of The Mexican Suitcase–a suitcase full of negatives of the Spanish war, shot by Capa et al–and also of the suitcases that someone found on the streets of Massachusetts, full of pictures of a ravaged Hiroshima after the war… both of them surprisingly full of important historical contents. And then there was this suitcase, this other Mexican suitcase, also full of images, of a very different nature. The contents are not historical, but it is history nonetheless: a personal history taken, kept, forgotten and lost and then sold. Because yes, I bought it with all it contained. And Tóxico then invited several talented visual artists to reinterpret the materials–or rather be inspired by them, to propose their own.
Today the suitcase flew into Cuba, ready to be shown at the Fototeca, in Habana. Besides, Alinka EcheverÃa–wonderful Mexican photographer, and one of the artists involved–will be working with several talented local photographer’s: the suitcase will leave the island with a new artist-book, created collectively.
And so the suitcase will travel now, and keep on traveling, and it will acquire a will of its own. It will travel with what it contains, both the new and some of the old, making space for both chance and accident, and at every stop a new artist will be added to the list and at every gallery or museum the project will be presented in a different type of installation. And just like before: who knows where it will end up, and in whose hands.
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Artists: Ramiro Chaves, Mark Powell, Mezli Vega, José Luis Cuevas, Carlos Casas, Maggie Delgado, Santiago da Silva, Carlos Ãlvarez Montero, Alinka EcheverrÃa, Lorena Moreno, Andrés Padilla, Corine Vermeulen, Alfredo Moreno, Omar Gamez, Gabriella Gómez-Mont and the anonymous photographer, the original owner of the suitcase.
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(Muchas gracias a Alinka EcheverÃa, Lorena Moreno y Maggie Delgado por su ayuda. Y gracias a Nelson–curador de Noviembre fotográfico– por su invitación.)
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(Soon a website for la Maleta)
NEW YORK DIARIES No. 004: IT IS GOING LIKE THAT
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.
A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point
…[...]…
Get a radio or phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a peformance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony. But I don’t mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music. Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, percieved anywhere remotely towards its true dimension”
-James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-
(page 15, author traveling on into Alabama, into the 30s, across the pictures of Walker Evans, up to the farms, into the tents)
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(Gracias Benji Z)
IF THE LIGHT GOES OUT. HOME FROM GUANTANAMO
Images by Edmund Clark
Says Lens Culture:
Photographer Edmund Clark has made a series of photographs that examine various aspects of the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay. He explores the facilities for the prisoners, and for the Americans who live there at the naval base. Then he visits and photographs at the homes of some of the detainees who have been freed, where the former detainees now find themselves trying to rebuild their lives.
The post-prison homes illustrate the contrast between the shared humanity of their domestic interiors and the spaces of the prison camps. Motifs of imprisonment and entrapment are present in both, resonating with the prisoners’ experiences — and coming to terms with them. Glimpsing the evening sun through a window is a simple thing but readjusting to having the freedom to do so may not be so simple. The narrative is confused and unsettled as the viewer is asked to jump from prison camp detail to domestic still life to naval base and back again. This disjointed edit is intended to evoke the disorientation of the process of incarceration and interrogation at Guantanamo and to explore the legacy of disturbance such an experience has in the minds and memories of these men.
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“When you are suspended by a rope you can recover but every time I see a rope I remember. If the light goes out unexpectedly I am back in my cell.â€
—Binyam Mohamed, Prisoner #1458
TÓXICO PROJECT RESEARCH No. 014: THAT MALLEABLE THING
Interesting web project: interviews with legendary documentary filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Albert Maysles, Errol Morris, Michel Brault etc, who give their views on different aspects of non-fiction cinema. The web page can be browsed by fragmented or unified themes, like a series of tiny interviews. Mmm. Nice. Click image, or click here to see.
AN EVENT
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“Observe together with me quietly and everything will happenâ€
-Sergei Dvortsevoy, filmmaker-
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TÓXICO’S COUNT-DOWN TO TED
Preparing, excited, leaving in one week to England, getting ready for Oxford and seeing what exactly it means to be a TED Fellow. Meanwhile. TED. More TED. Yes. TED in anticipation to TEDing. Libeskind, here, for example. Talking about 17 words that underlie his vision for architecture — raw, risky, emotional, radical and wonder are some of them: to create a place that has never existed, to create that which has never been. A struggle against improbability. Expression which disturbs, and yet maybe that is what life is about: not about anesthesia. Definitely not anesthesia. A living connection, emotion to be introduced into city life, in city forms. Emotions not just of the people that build them, but of people that will live there as well.
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 007: LA DÉRIVE
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(I will walk very quickly at night so quickly until a specific leaf falls from a random tree)
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NON-LINEAR STATE No. 006: EXFORMATION
«Is it possible to communicate not by “making known,” but by “making understood how little we know”? If we can recognize that we know so little, a method for finding out how little we know will become clear as well. As the Greek philosopher Socrates remarked, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” There are an infinite number of methods to attain knowledge; finding the right method is up to the individual. This single idea throws conventional communication methods into reverse. I call this method “exformation,” as a counterpart concept to “information.” “In” is to “ex” as “inform” is to “exform.” In their words, I want to speculate on the form as well as the function of information, not for making things, but for making things unknown.»
-Hara, Kenya. “The Process of Making Things Unkown” -
(Gracias señor Santiago)
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 003: UNEXPECTED DETOURS
“An ars erotica, then, which would teach, not only skills in obtaining pleasure and acceding to their powers, but an aesthetics of bodies and of pleasures and of their powers. What could an ars erotica be in the age of bio-political administration? ”
Alphonso Lingis-Foreign Bodies
NON-LINEAR STATE No. 001: UN-KNOWING
“I am interested in confusion, and confusion is obviously a non-linear state. In a confused environment the unexpected can happen at any time. It is a very productive and beautiful state of mind to me, yet it’s something we usually have difficulty appreciating. In fact, because it can connote danger, there have been a great many efforts to keep confusion to a minimum. But maybe that’s what we need right now: not danger per se, but the possibility of exploring confusion’s benefits. If you are able to give in to it and appreciate its beauty, it can be quite fruitful ground for change. It doesn’t need to be total confusion. It can mean succumbing to a specific form of confusion where you don’t know as much as you did before. Paradoxically, that can be very productive.”
–Carsten Holler, Belgian artist–
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(Will be posting excerpts from the book “Broken Screen”, a series of interviews made by the artist Doug Aitken, on creative processes, breaking the narrative and multidisciplinary practices; many favorite Tóxico research themes.)