Dance

Notes from the 'Naked Lunch' by William Burroughs

"We friends, yes?"

  The shoe shine boy put his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any other feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory.

Notes from "Illuminations - The films of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

programme:
Mario Giacomelli: Contacts, 1993, 35mm, black and white, 13'
Animali Criminali, 1994, 16mm, colour, silent, 7'
Lo Specchio di Diana (The Looking Glass of Diana), 1996, video, colour, soundtrack by Keith Ulrich, 31'


History and memory
Body and embodiment
Death and cinema

Materiality of film (textures, speed, temporal disturbances, colour) that leads to the imaginary, experienced as a haunting.
Photographers as explorers
Cinematographic pornography
Symbology of fascism - invisible hand puts one creature against another (Animali Criminali)
The image with the grammar of cinema
Secrets on top of secrets on top of secrets
Cinematic archaeology
Ships of the desert = camera
Mussolini : Everyone wants to touch his hands but he's wearing gloves (forms of behaviour)
Sensory cinematography - the 'touch' (contact, missing contact)

from "snow white terror tale"

You can see 

and you can hear

but from inside the tomb of your mind

no breath will escape your lips

no tears your eyes

to the world you are dead

And soon, even your precious father will forget you were ever alive

But you my dear

you will have all the eternity

to remember

There is the blueprint

Notes from "The face of Garbo" by Roland Barthes

...when the face represented a kind of absolute state of flesh...

[...]

...are two faintly tremulous wounds.

[...]

She herself knew this: how many actresses have consented to let the crowd see the ominous maturing of their beauty. Not she, however; the essence was not to be degraded, her face was not to have any reality except that of its perfection, which was intellectual even more than formal. The Essence became gradually obscured, progressively veiled with dark glasses, broad hats and exiles: but it never deteriorated.

[...]

A mask is but a sum of lines; a face on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony. Garbo's face representes this fragile moment when the cinema is about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype leans towards the fascination of mortal faces, when the clarity of the flesh as essence yields its place to a lyricism of Woman.

[...]

...the passage from awe to charm.

[...]

As a language, Garbo's singularity was of the order of the concept, that of Audrey Hepburn, an event.

Notes from 'Feel Flows : The Films of Phil Solomon' @ Tate

'Nocturne'

private made public, but available

non-ironic montage

the compulsion to be with others in language (observation made to someone texting on mobile right after 'Nocturne')

the world ending with water, fire and ice

night photography

lighting as the essence of film

everyone suspect to sentimentality. Hollywood to blame.

economy of gesture

metaphor

aura as light

night as a field where your eye moves across

nathaniel dorsky

joseph cornell


Films screened :

'What's out Tonight is Lost', 1983, 16mm, colour, silent, 8 min

'Psalm I : The Lateness of the Hour, 2001, 16mm, colour, silent, 10min

'Nocturne', 1980, 16mm, b/w, silent, 10min

'Seasons...', 2011, 16mm, colour, silent, 15min

'Remains to be seen' 1989/94, 16mm, colour, sound, 17min

Notes from the show 'Progress / OMA' @ Barbican

Desert

As a quasi-apocalyptic mood holds us, and the idea of a worldwide wave of 'saving' the environment shows signs of faltering - too expensive, politically unfeasible - we should rediscover the beauty of the desert: not only as a metaphor of our future, but perhaps as a state we could aspire to: present in unimaginable quantities, distributed over the entire globe, pure, often surprisingly habitable, (at least part of the year), they are also easier to "protect" than more demanding ecologies... A good way to begin our future...

Countryside

What did those billions who left the city leave behind? The countryside is now the front line of transformation. A world formerly dictated by the seasons and the organization of agriculture is now a toxic mix of genetic experiment, science, incidental inhabitation, tax incentives, investment, political turmoil, spill over development, terminal class warfare, in other words more volatile than the most accelerated city...

Generics

If 'bloated' is the word that best describes the outcome of many forms of contemporary exaggeration / excess - bloated sectors, bloated bills - can we make sobriety appealing? Generic medicines have been a noticeable success in the war against inflation. Can we achieve the same effect in architecture by introducing GENERICS, designs that focus on essentials, repeatable perhaps, prefabricated even? Projects for instance that would embody legal minimums, foreign worker accommodation, a resurrection of the modernists' existenziminimum*, a voluntary surrender of that is unnecessary, that could have a political potential...

*the minimum accommodation necessary for a dignified existence.

sum

Notes on "The Future of the image" by Jacques Ranciere

from the "Journal of Visual Culture": 

The image as currently conceived does not offer the possibility of critical insight, let alone political efficacy;

rather, it induces only a nostalgic desire for ‘a promise of flesh capable of dispelling the simulacra of resemblance, the artifices of art, and the tyranny of the letter’ (p. 8). This is not as desperate or dire as it seems: our eucharistic desire is symptomatic of an ‘aesthetic regime’ that has framed and organized the ‘distribution of the sensible’ around the concept of the

‘unrepresentable’ since the mid-19th century.

-Jae Emerling

...For by way of compensation [they] then received a new image-value, which is nothing other than the twofold power of aesthetic images: the inscription of the signs of a history and the affective power of sheer presence that is no longer exchanged for anything...

-Jacques Ranciere