A thousand platforms

Gianni Peng/Live Arts Week is an annual, week-long event that takes place in Bologna and that results from merging two previously-existent festivals, F.I.S.Co and Netmage. Organized by the collective Xing and in its second year of activity, Live Arts Week aims at exploring modes of presenting the performative that are attentive to the perceptive and sensorial experiences derived from it.

It is therefore a research aim – that of understanding how live media can be showed, and of imagining the relations that the conditions of liveness establish with its participants – that is at the core of this project.

If the early activities of the collective were mainly concerned with the forms of the live act (F.I.S.Co, 2001-11), and the nature of the image in the digital age (Netmage, 2000-11), Gianni Peng moved towards an inquiry upon what lies at, into, or across the objects and terrains of time-based practices, and upon what connects and combines its resources, agents and temporalities.
  It is, in fact, the exploration of such space of inbetweeness that gave the overall tone this year’s Live Arts Week. This investigation triggered a dialogue across dance, choreography, performance, art, moving image and music that was not so much grounded on merging and combining the specificities of each practice and on unifying their languages, but on producing an ongoing flux of proposals that – by being presented and displayed in an often common location – generated poignant associations and disruptures.

 A substantial part of the live events were hosted at the ground floor of the MAMbo. Not being a media-configured venue (a black box, a theatre, or a concert hall) nor a historically-charged container, this space allowed itself to be continuously reinvented and adapted throughout the whole week.
  Even the constituents of the environment, the structures of reception, display, and hospitality that were conceived by Canedicoda together with Mirko Rizzi, intentionally appeared to be precarious and transient. Made out of recycled wood and plastic, they had an unstable appearance, as if they were about to crumble apart and become something else.

Each act altered the morphology and perception of the space, as it happened during the four duets that composed the programme of Friday, the 19^th of April. The evening started with utterly compelling neo-hippyish, glittering event performed the Swedish artist and theoretician Mårten Spångberg together with the musician Lune, to give way to the hard, noise-like sonorities of Growing’s Joe DeNardo, which were combined with the 16mm projections of five short, abstract loops made by the experimental filmmaker Rose Kallal, which created a disturbing and dazing audiovisual performance. It was followed by U$e Your Illu$ion$, a spectral audiovisual performance that merged the phantasmagoria of the post-internet aesthetics of Out4pizza with the spectral, reverberating post-dub sonorities and dehumanized voice of Dracula Lewis. Pursuing the counterpoint between exhilarating light and toxic darkness, the session was closed with Sun Araw’s concert, which combined improvised psych-rock and roots with the projection of a video loop that depicted a short-circuit relation between a leopard and its reflection.

Other high moments in the festival included Tony Conrad’s re-enactment of his cinematic performance Fifty-one Years on the Infinite Plain (1972-2013); Eszter Salamon and Christine De Smedt’s Dance #2, that weaved gesture and word; the entrancing concert of Helm (Luke Younger), that pushed noise music into a hypnagogic dimension, which was further explored by Goodiepal’s delirious babbling lectures.   This multi-disciplinary flux was supported by a series of installations and environments that further questioned spatial practices and disciplines. Among them Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky’s site-specific exhibition We, the frozen storm, which presented an array of images, sounds and evocations in the subterranean galleries of the Pincio shelter, and Riccardo Benassi’s animist tale of a chair and series of video essays Techno Casa that offer a lucid exploration of the relations between man, setup and technology in the current anthropocene.

The screening of Pierre Huyghe’s film The Host and The Cloud (2011) - which was conceived as a series of three performances inside the former Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires of Paris and edited in a delirious manner in which dream, hallucination and reality are indistinguishable – adds yet another contribute for the reflection on the modes of inhabiting and traversing places, and museum spaces in particular.    Throughout Live Arts Week one had the feeling that it was the horizontal cohabitation of diverse forms in a condensed timeframe that allowed for the audience and works to meet and become a single, yet fragile and unique, entity made of one thousand platforms. Filipa Ramos (@tweetfilipa)

16 — 21 Abril 2013
Live Arts Week
Various locations
Bologna