This Became my Text
Author(s):
Cristina Mendanha (presenting / submitting) Filipe Lopes (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Format:
Video

Session Information

29 SES 13, Art as Research, Art & Research

Paper/Video Session

Time:
2017-08-25
13:30-15:00
Room:
W2.06
Chair:
Luis Castro Pauperio

Contribution

This video is a textual event but also a gear mechanism of apparently non-related characteristics that give birth to arbitrary connections. It’s also a textual experiment in which overlapping becomes a mechanism that produces it’s own connections. The mechanism that emerged from this experience drew unexpected directions and surprising sensations.

The words are images. Or rather every word is a image. When the words are joining the problems start . So, their relationships are not always interesting, passionate or understandably.

It is not tragic that does not exist a understandable relationship. We can even find a justification. The difficulty is to encourage a justification that can be productive. So, repeated relationships is a trend that forced me to look for new unions.

All artistic expressions should be called experimental. Insecure and with no protective floor mat. In contemporary music it happens. The melody and the syntax of the work are initially difficult to grasp because the succession of sounds is unpredictable. Probably only a repeated listening of the work allows us to feel that there is melody, ie : that we are facing something which resembles a narrative that makes sense.

It seems to me imperative a turnoff in the worn and inefficient grammars and a investent in the invention of a new poetic syntax, following perhaps Mallarmé, without repeating patterns.

To understand that single words may have their sense units, I invoke the contemporary music. I invoke the words that do not easily relate to each other, or phrases which are interrupted or not ending. Words that combine incomplete sentences that make us feel what is impossible to say and what hides behind the certainty of experience and reality .

But our perception of reality has been modified. The research literature teaches us and forces us to look behind the insignificance of what is apparently insignificant. We can find a wealth of meanings which our habits, distractions and received education does not allow to see. 

As Foucault (1975) argues "Life's interpretation, however, is the belief that there are no more than interpretations. It seems to me necessary to understand something that many of our contemporaries forget, ie that hermeneutics and semiology are two enemies. A hermeneutics which a semiotics tends to believe in the absolute existence of symbols: abandon violence, unfinished, the infinity of interpretations, to reign terror suspect content and language. We recognize the later marxism. On the contrary, a hermeneutics that develops by itself, enters the field of languages that should be involved in each other, this intermediate region between madness and pure language, is where we recognize Nietzsche "(p.27)

The work may consist of less considered elements of meaning, but as finished totality imposes itself as revelation of a sense. It has the importance and depth of meaning that in the past was only given to major themes, to the key challenges, the events that feature life or experience. What appears to inform may be an yet undiscovered way of organizing experience and to create a art work in art education research.

Method

Work for my text research: The process is the opposite of a somatic process used in dance. We do not hear breathing. In contrast we observe how quickly the mind blowing and try to force the body to imitate this frenzy. With a timer BEEP: Lying still with my eyes closed, I imagine my body, here in this spot in this room now and what it does for 10 seconds BEEP. Then, BEEP: do what happened in my mind for 10 seconds BEEP. After 10 seconds in the head and 10 seconds in the body, we write. Sometimes we use automatic writing, sometimes we try to describe what happened. At the end of a week and hundreds of these mini dances made a collection of all writings and videos. Edit all,  selecting  all the phrases in which we described each other. We combine the selection and put it in sequence of occurrence trying to remember detail of the action and what words they referred. Then, we work on this narratives. The idea was to find new relationships.

Expected Outcomes

Work for my movement and text search: The video emerged from a week of improvisation. We wrote and it became a fact and a subject matter to all participants.The memories were being erased and issues were  put together with new interpretations. After practicing a while the words become heavier than the memories of those discretions. The adhesion was measured in written text  while challenged me to objectify them, demanding improvisation, expression and reflction. It was all established improvisation.The work emerged as its own author and director at the same time insisted on the possibility of its definition. It is all valid and confused. The question appeared to be: if my students dance while listening to music, why not also write texts while dancing? If you suppose that the spoken language has literal, metaphoric or symbolic meanings, why can you not write with what comes from movements? Maybe the difficulty lies where the margin of interpretation appears more limited compared to music. Or the risk of not rendering convincing the relationship between senseless movements and words with a relatively clear sense, classifiable by any dictionary who can define it as being of a greater risk. A risk of becoming trivial? A risk of digressing in a delirious way? Regarding the e. e. cummings sentence: "... poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality...." the problem of being an "individuality" it is not easy to reach. Everything tends to make us people's common sense. We act according to models supplied to us and rarely put it into question. We are comfortable dragged by the past. But we are going.The question is: How can we be one if everything make us alike and repeated?

References

-Barthes, R. (1999 [1970]) S/Z, (A. M. Leite and M. de Santa Cruz, Trans.) Lisboa: Edições 70 - Deleuze, G. (1992 [1990]) Conversações, Editora 34- coleção trans., 1ª Edição Brasileira, trans. Peter Pál Pelbart, 7ª Reimpressão 2008.
Deleuze, G. (2013[1965]), Nietzshe, Tradução-Alberto Campos, Edições 70, Junho de 2013. - Deleuze and Guattari (2004 [1972]) O Anti-Édipo, Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia, Ed. Assírio & Alvim, Trad. Joana Moraes Varela e Manuel Maria Carrilho.
 - Foucault, M . ( 1997 [1975]) NIETZSCHE, FREUD E MARX, trad. Jorge Lima Barreto, Princípio Editora , António Daniel Abrei, Editor, São Paulo. - Gil, J. (1997). Metamorfoses do corpo, [Metamorphoese of the body]. Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo Ed Ltd. - Nietzsche, F. 1999 [1886]), Para Além do Bem e do Mal (prelúdio de uma Filosofia do Futuro),Trad. E notas de Carlos Mojurão, Relógio D'Água Editores, Março de 1999. - Van Loon, K.; Wilder A. (2014) Passing For Dance a Hijack Reader Contact Quarterly dance & improvisation journal CQ chapbook5 Vol. 39 no2 Summer/fall 2014. -Souriau, É. (1983 [1969]) A Correspondência das Artes: Elementos de Estética Comparada. Trad. Maria C. Queiroz e Maria H. R. da Cunha. São Paulo: Cultrix/EDUSP.

Author Information

Cristina Mendanha (presenting / submitting)
i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society| Faculty of Fine Arts - University of Oporto
i2ADS - Research Institute in Art, Design and Society| Faculty of Fine Arts - University of Oporto
Porto
Filipe Lopes (presenting)
Arte Total - Education Centre for Art

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