At the End of the Demostration Day

At the End of the Demonstration Day
2009
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg

Marina with Carolita

Locus Solus

Locus Solus is a intermedia project exploring the idea of science in relation to accounts of contemporary and historical utopic imagination. This performance based installation project draws on the novel Locus Solus ('Solitary or Unique Place', 1914) by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a proto-Surrealist text in which a scientist named Martial Canterel fits out luxurious laboratories in a villa near Paris. Each room demonstrates one of the ingenious inventions of his encyclopaedic mind.
The production appeals to the temporal sense of the viewer, while it deploys a model based on an analogy between Canterel's laboratories and a museum. The luxurious laboratories with the ingenious inventions represent the gallery where visual artists will exhibit their work. Canterel offers an insight into the work of visual artists.
These art works have in common an approach to site that is actual and imaginary, a play between fact and fiction. Site may be an existing location, an activity, or a small found object. Acoustic and electric sounds audible in the installation, will be produced by the performers and viewers interacting with the architectural spaces (reflective cylindrical mirrors). Surveillance cameras will transmit these different spaces and activities. During the sound system/architecture interface, the viewers will feel as if they are in different spaces of Locus Solus.
By investigating the potentials generated through interactive technologies of digital and immersive media, the project aims to generate new understandings of and research into the impact and significance of perception in multiple sensory registers (auditory, visual, tactile), as well as the importance of non-verbal communication.
The project will develop an approach to spatial use, through the application of augmented reality systems for spatial visualisation. Augmented reality overlays virtual objects over the real space. Parallel to this, the project will integrate a contemporary approach to anamorphic art; artists will experiment with the use of the geometry of perspective.

Roussel was preoccupied with the prefabrication of language, with the “readymade” and artifactual quality of words and his narrative was interrupted by parenthetical thought. His work has intrigued the Surrealists, Duchamp, Michel Foucault, John Ashbery, Cocteau and writers of the nouveau roman like Alain Robbe-Grillet who said that “the clarity and transparency of his works, exclude the existence of other worlds behind things and yet we discover that we can't get out of this world. Everything is at a standstill, everything is always happening all over again.”
Roussel explored the boundaries and possibilities of language and representation in the form of “trompe-l'oeil” and of the labyrinth, while his works unleashed cascades of mirrors and strange machines. His text have seldom been presented in a theatrical context, however, he has been rediscovered and is now considered an ancestor of much experimental writing being done today in Europe and America.
The Rousselian cosmos and the notion of “trompe l'oeil” and of “mise en abyme” represents a dynamic fusion, where we can research on the relationship of the image, the object, the sound and the word. Moreover, the group has a core interest in the contrasting methods used in theatre practice and in curatorial practices in the visual arts, as well as the juncture where the two collide and possibly make a new field altogether. Therefore, research will focus on the relationships between 'matrixed' and 'open-matrixed' compositional methods.

The production seeks to present issues involving private (solitary) and public space, hence it will deal with space, in terms of its physical transformation, through the movement of both the spectators and the performers. The procedural acoustic and visual installations, constructed by the architects, the visual artists and the scenographers will remain "in situ," and will only be transformed during the interaction with the performers for the actual performance.
Parallel to this, researchers from the School of Architecture, University of Patras, will investigate points of intersection (connections, linkages, overlaps) between the project and the public domain of the City.
The dramaturgy will draw on the analogy between text, image and sound, in order to present an open work of literary allusions and echoes, narrative episodes and descriptive scenes, 'verbal found' objects, shifting aesthetic styles and registers.
The production will be the locus for dynamic interactions between the body and material objects (including machines and technological devices) inside and outside, living and anti-organic, and for the problematization and blurring of these distinctions. Four performers and four dancers will embody eight figures within eight "Tableaux Vivants,” as John Ashbery described
A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine,' a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life. " Foucault, Death & The Labyrinth, epilogue John Ashbery"


Locus Solus
2004-09

These moving tableaux (as imagined by Roussel), their poetic facets and incarnations of flânerie (drifting) will be transposed beyond the empirical spaces of the city. The processual, as a form and these constructed textual, visual and aural environments, will be the framework for thinking about the relationships between “private-solitary” and “public” space.


Locus Solus is a two year project will be devised during a period of five months and will be presented, as a processual project (based on the structure of process art) in art galleries theatrical spaces, conferences, academic research centres: Shunt Vaults, London bridge, The museum of contemporary art in Novi Sad, The Fourth International Conference on the Arts in Society, which will be held in Venice, Italy, 29-31 July 2009, in conjunction with the Venice Biennale. At the 10th Conference of Utopian Studies Society, University of Porto, July, 2009. At the PSi conference Misperformance : Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading will take place in Zagreb, Croatia, June 24 – 28 2009 and will be part of London European Festival and other venues.

Conceived and directed by Sozita Goudouna

Contributors : Kostas Moschos (IEMA), The Erasers, Alexander Mistriotis, Margarita Bofiliou, Christina Sgouromiti, Kostis Velonis, Polyxeni Aklidi, Anna Elefanti, Ieronimos Kaletsanos, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Melia Kreiling, Nefeli Skarmea, Kostis Alivizatos, Lina Dima, Zoe Langi, Yorgis Noukakis, Dimitra Stamatiou, Panos Kouros, Christina Penna, Dejan Garbos, Srdjan Segan, Ladislav Zajac,Eszter Jagica, Alexandra Waierstall, Mischa Twitchin, Julieta Kindermann

Shunt Vaults, 24 april-3 May, London
Source :www. soluslocus.blogspot.com

Rapt Your

Emily Verla Bovino
Galleria Cezare Manzo,Roma
29 april - 2 june, 2009

Against 'Common Sense'

Something has happened, we are told. But has something really happened? In which reality did it take place? And does it have any meaning? One way of understanding the new is to approach it via comparisons. In Artforum magazine, under the title ‘Common Sense’ (December 2008), Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, compares what has supposedly happened in September 2008 with the ‘crises’ of 1968 and 1989. This is surprising. And I like surprises, which is why I want to take another look at this comparison between last autumn and the spring of forty years ago.
Back then, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Paris, Prague and other major cities. They were students, but also workers. They turned against their governments, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. They demanded to be governed differently in future. This time round, I heard nothing about large-scale demonstrations. Esche points out that the question of ‘How do we want to be governed?’ stood at the centre of last year’s Documenta. But he does not mention that it was a paraphrase of Michel Foucault, one of neoliberalism’s first critics, who raised this same question in his lectures in the mid-1970s.
Six weeks after Esche’s article was published, two million people braved the bitter cold to gather in Washington. But they had not turned against their government. They did not declare a general strike or throw stones. No revolutionary desires were crushed by tanks, as they were in Prague in 1968. No, the peacefully assembled masses were there to welcome their new president. Rather than asking how they wanted to be governed, they listened to how it was going to be done. The new president told them that the nation was still at war with sinister networks. The current financial problems, he said, were caused by a few bankers and managers straying from the path of virtue, plus those degenerates who place pleasure before work. More control will help against both groups, he promised, as will humility and hard work; this is the way to reinstate old values with the latest tools; together, we can return to a state of security. Those listening to these promises were moved, all seemingly eager to go back to the future.
After this address, I am no closer to grasping the similarity seen by Esche between May 1968 and autumn 2008. What in recent months has been styled a turning point in history doesn’t even seem to be a change of system. It amounts at best to a switch from a capitalist regime of deregulation to a regime of regulation. In this light, it’s no wonder Barack Obama has reappointed some of the now-aged advisors to Ronald Reagan, the architects of Reaganomics, as his closest members of staff. The ‘crisis’ functions as the engine for a reassertion of capitalist hegemony, an engine designed to speed things up and push obstacles out of the way, to prove that the end is not an option. Sure, the newly adjusted order must look more like democracy – it’s regulated, after all – so torture cannot be permitted. But it seems grotesque to applaud when the world’s (still) leading democratic nation forswears torture. Even in ailing conditions, there is no reason to settle for the least.
It is a strange coincidence that the United States has elected its first black president at precisely the moment when the country needs its black population again. For some time now, a gigantic fence has been under construction, a fence separating the United States from Mexico and Latin America. Its aim is to stem the mass northwards migration of workers. In recent years, workers from south of the border have performed a not-insignificant share of the physical labour in the United States. But the disadvantages of this obedient and flexible workforce are now becoming clear. Although their jobs are mostly seasonal, they remain in the country illegally and don’t pay taxes. And they don’t make good consumers, as they send most of their wages home. In spite of their low pay, this causes a considerable currency drain. This is about to change. Thanks to a positive role model, the illegal migrant workers are to be replaced by legal Afro-Americans. This cynically fulfils certain demands of the black civil rights movement, as black labour and its purchasing power are back in demand now that the business model of globalization has served its term.
In contrast to the current situation, the year 1968 supplied a timeframe for a real event, something that revealed the possibility of a different society. The ‘credit crunch’, on the other hand, has generated nothing even remotely resembling an event. The word ‘credit’ has its roots in the Latin credere, meaning ‘to believe’, while the concept of ‘crisis’ comes from medicine, referring to the critical point in an illness. The fact that this belief system has been shaken by a crisis seems to have resulted above all in even more borrowing, taking capitalist common sense into a hyper-religious phase. Apart from this ecstatic surge in belief/credit, no identifiable higher political truth has yet been derived from the crisis. Is this illness too harmless to bring about an interruption in the course of things?
There is no doubt that the current recoiling, the ‘recession’, will be terrible for many people. But the question of how we want to be governed is still not being asked, not by governments nor by those who are governed. Whether or not it will eventually lead to a revolutionary ‘event’ – as Esche expectantly predicts ¬– cannot yet be foreseen. So far, what happened in 2008 has served above all to prolong the succession of crises in an order without prospects. To interrupt these monotonous loops, it will take a truth capable of unlocking an event. The uprisings of May 1968 constituted such an event, making a different society conceivable. In Paris at least, one stimulus for this came from art in the form of Guy Debord’s revolt-inciting The Society of the Spectacle. The consequences of the event-less credit crunch renew the call – a call also addressed to art – to move both symbolically and in real terms against today’s ‘common sense’ towards more far-reaching change.

Text by Hans-Christian Dany
Source : www.metropolism.com
Translation: Nicolas Grindell

Afro Abe

Sonya Clark’s Afro Abe II, 2007. Hand-embroidered, French knotted thread on five dollar bill

You've got a lot to live

Song to the Siren

Tim Buckley - Song to the Siren
by jugatsu

Tim Buckley,1970

Mask XXIV

John Stezaker
Mask XXIV, 2006
Collage, 25x20cm

Design for the misfits

Εξαρχεια 09

City of the Future

A.Lavinskii, city of the future:plans , 1922
reproduced in LEF, no.1, 1923

Zlin

The Moravian city of Zlín is considered a model city of Modernity par excellence. Built in the 1920s and 1930s, its planners drew their inspiration from Le Corbusier’s “functional city”, Howard’s garden city, and Garnier’s ‘cité industrielle’. Its urban-utopian aspiration made it into a unique example of urban planning in the history of European industry – inseparably connected to the Zlín firm of Bat´a, one of the first shoe manufacturers to operate globally. The success story of the company’s founder Tomáš Bat’a and Zlín’s architectural history have both been exhaustively examined; what is missing is an extensive cultural analysis of Zlín as a “utopian project”, one which examines urbanity from the perspective of a comparative critique of ideology on the one hand, while also striving to (re-) vitalize the discussion of the relationship between Modernity and the city. A symposium to be held in Zlín between 19 – 23 May 2009 and an exhibition in fall 2009 in Germany shall contribute to this cultural analysis, for the first time investigating the interrelationships between economic and social, biographical and architectural factors in this utopian urban planning project. In this way the symposium and exhibition also represent an important contribution to the current European discussion on urbanity.
A trip to Zlín in southern Moravia is a trip to an actually built utopia. The factories, in which today smaller industrial enterprises have located their premises, the generous green spaces, and the free-standing apartment blocks were once the scene of a social experiment: here shoes were not only mass produced, but also the “new man”. The urban planning realized in Zlín has two faces: on the one hand, it was to serve a thoroughly regimented and controllable social entity – this is shown alone by the elevator which Jan Baťa, the brother of the company founder Tomáš, had mounted on the outside wall of the headquarters in 1938: this was nothing other than his mobile office, with which, moving between the floors of the building, he could at any time and unexpectedly seek out his employees. On the other hand, Zlín, which followed ideas of the garden city formulated by Ebenezer Howard, was as a genuine and convincing attempt to solve problems plaguing larger cities: the oppressive density of overpopulated tenements, sanitary shortcomings and air pollution, the lack of green spaces – these are all factors the city architect František Lydie Gahura avoided in his concept of a “factory in green space” presented in 1925. Tomáš and Jan Baťa, sons of a simple shoemaker, were to go a long way in their father’s craft, eventually establishing the family name as globally known brand. Zlín, the factory, was the nucleus of their success. The synchronization of city and enterprise, a strict regimenting of the everyday routine of employees, and the rigorous implementation of Fordist serial production not only proved that the Baťas were clever entrepreneurs, but also radical social engineers. Zlín was so schematically constructed that not only the shoes produced there became export hits. The factory city itself could be erected elsewhere like a reproducible module. Jan Baťa demonstrated precisely this – after leaving Czechoslovakia as it was under Nazi occupation, he established new Baťa cities at various locations across the world, much in the vein of the franchising principle.

Learning from Zlín?
Pursing this question would be more than worthwhile: after all, Zlín embodies the utopian trait of Modernity in the form of an ideal-type. At the same time though, the attempt to provide an integrated solution to the problem of balancing work and leisure for everyone reveals how similar the results can be despite very different political objectives. The idea of equality which the Baťas had developed for their employees was not inspired by a leftist social utopia; it was the means to achieve a coolly calculated optimization of performance in the sense of Fordist factory production. Ultimately, any discussion about Zlín will have to pose the question as to how the industrial legacy of Modernity is to be approached in a postindustrial age. The direction can be taken from the present-day city itself: the governing authority has already decided against placing the city under monument protection and so refused a “musealization”. Zlín is a unique and exemplary chapter of Modernity. Astonishingly, it is nonetheless little known. The attention afforded the city by Zipp in a symposium and exhibition can only be the beginning of a more intensive exploration of this theme.

Contributors include Daniel M. Abramson, Anette Baldauf, Ivan Bergmann, Regina Bittner, Pavel Chládek, Markéta Dvořáčková, Klára Eliášová, Lucie Galčanová, Adam Gebrian, Gunter Henn, Petr Hlaváček, Ladislava Horňáková, Hucot, Richard Ingersoll, Lukáš Kohl, Igor Kovačevič, Eric Mumford, Winfried Nerdinger, Dagmar Nová, Jiří Novotný, Jan Obšívač, Ladislav Pastrnek, Zdenĕk Pokluda, Dagmar Prášilová, Arnold Reijndorp, Jitka Ressová, Cyril Říha, Andreas Ruby, Radomíra Sedláková, Zdenĕk Skaunic, Štefan Šlachta, Svatopluk Sládeček, Vladimír Šlapeta, Annett Steinführer, Rostislav Švácha, Petr Szczepanik, Mária Topolčanská, Barbora Vacková, Pavel Velev, Tomáš Vlček, Petr Všetečka and Karin Wilhelm.

International Symposium
May 19 - 23 2009, Zlín and Prague
Source :http://www.projekt-zipp.de
http://www.dumb.cz

Endless Construction (Victory over the Sun)

Endless Construction (Victory over the Sun), 2009
10 m x 4 m x 90 cm
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg

Scarecrow

Pink Floyd "Scarecrow" with Syd Barret, 1967

Transrational book

Olga Rozanova 'Zaumnaya gniga [Transrational book]' by Aleksei Kruchenykh and Alyagrov 1915 collage, colour linocut

Folding Crown

A folding gold crown from one of the six graves of Bactrian nomads discovered at Tillya Tepe in northern Afghanistan in 1978. The crown, dating from the first century A.D. and wrought of solid gold, was collapsible for easy transport by the ancient nomads.

All Night Party

John Armleder, All Night Party (FS), 2003.

Intimité plus grande avec les astres

Intimité plus grande avec les astres
Et dans la nuit sondée plus profond
Dans la nuit rapprochée la terre
Débouche sur le soleil cette étoile agrandie

Au coeur de la nuit le jour
Nuit de la nuit connaît
Une étoile plus brillante

Greater intimacy with the stars
And in the deeper sounded night
In the night closer drawn the earth
Emerges into the sun that enlarged star

At the heart of night day
Night of night knows
A star more brilliant

Michel Deguy, 1965

Revolt of the Beavers

The Federal Theatre Project produced a variety of children’s plays. The great majority were warmly received. The Revolt of the Beavers, however, stirred political passions from the moment it premiered. In the play, two small children are transported to “Beaverland,” where society is run by a cruel beaver chief. “The Chief” forces the other beavers to work endlessly on the “busy wheel,” turning bark into food and clothing, then hoards everything for himself and his friends. With the help of the children, a beaver named Oakleaf organizes his brethren, overthrows The Chief, and establishes a society where everything is shared. The show played to packed houses during its brief New York City run, but its message drew fire.
Theater critic Brooks Atkinson labeled it “Marxism a la Mother Goose.”

Source: virtualstoa.net

How to Build Democracy Making Rhetorical Comments

How to build democracy making rhetorical comments (after Klucis' design for propaganda kiosk, screen and loudspeaker platform, 1922), 2009
6.60 m x 4.50 m x 7.76 m
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg

Mediterranean

Coordinamento di: Danilo Eccher
A cura di: Elena Lydia Scipioni

Palazzo Rospigliosi

Evento dedicato alla giovane creatività svolta nell'area del Mediterraneo, un tentativo di dare voce a nuovi territori della ricerca e a inedite sperimentazioni. Croazia, Albania, Grecia, Turchia, Libano, Israele, Egitto ma anche Spagna, Francia provenzale e Italia del Sud a testimonianza di un'area geografica estremamente complessa ma anche vitale, un'area solitamente individuata come luogo di problematicità: guerra, immigrazione, scontro religioso, povertà, ma che potrebbe invece avere anche il volto di una giovane e attiva ricerca.

Opere in mostra:

Loukia Alavanou
Birds and feathers, 2006
Video. 4'33''
Courtesy l’artista
Alice Anderson
Blood drawing series II, 2008
Sangue su carta
21 x 30 cm
Courtesy l'artista
Lara Baladi
Oum el Dounia, 2006
Stampa Lambda, laminata su plexi
300 x 100 cm
Edizione di 6 2 AP
Courtesy l’artista; Galleria Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, Roma, Firenze
Francesco Carone
Quadrante, 2008
cristallo, lenti ottiche
150,3 x 107,8 x 15 cm
Courtesy Galleria SpazioA, Pistoia
Christina Dimitriadis
The Trap, Berlin, 2007
N. 4 stampa Lambda
70 x 70 cm
Courtesy z2o Galleria l Sara Zanin, Roma
Adrià Julià
The Reunion, 2009
Video
Courtesy l’artista
Vénera Kastrati
Damn the very first emigrant, 2007
Color print sotto doppio plexiglas montato su supporto di legno dipinto,
piccole sedie dipinte con testi stampati.
Dimensioni variabili
Courtesy Galleria Federico Bianchi Contemporary Art, Lecco
Sandro Mele
Lucha, 2008
Foto su forex, cemento, tempera, cera, piombo, ferro
106 x 156 cm
Courtesy Fondazione Volume!, Roma
Domingo Milella
Ankara, 2007
C-print
60 x 75 cm cad
Edizione di 5
Courtesy l’artista; Galleria Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, Roma, Firenze
Moataz Nasr
Propaganda, 2008
tessuti ricamati
110 x 108 cm
110 x 110 cm
110 x 110 cm
Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Le Moulin
Moataz Nasr
Khayameya, 2008
7.032 fiammiferi su legno
100 x 100 x 7 cm
Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Le Moulin
Sergio Prego
Courtroom 21 (After Black Monday), 2006
Video, 4'14''
Courtesy Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli
Collezione privata
Anri Sala
Air Cushioned Ride, 2006
Video dvd, 06' 04''
Courtesy Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli
Matteo Sanna
Soggetto Sottinteso, 2009
Giclee fine art print, cinque scatti singoli
70x50 cm cad.
Pezzo Unico
Courtesy Galleria Changing Role, Napoli, Roma
Gaia Scaramella
Finestre, 2008
Collages, incisione calcografica
Dimensioni delle singole marionette incorniciate 14 x 9 cm cad.
Dimensioni totali dell'installazione: 120 x 170 x 5 cm
Courtesy z2o Galleria l Sara Zanin, Roma
Franco Silvestro
Bombola di gas, 1999
scultura in gesso
80 x 40 cm
Courtesy Galleria Il Ponte Contemporanea, Roma
Gian Paolo Striano
Abjuration, 2009
Legno, cavo e gancio d'acciaio, calamite
200 x 140 x 75 cm
Courtesy Galleria Blindarte contemporanea, Napoli
Kostis Velonis
Brancusi was a hippie carpenter or the phyisical condition of mockery through space, 2008
Legno, acrilico, lacca
175 x 80 x 70 cm
Courtesy l’artista; Galleria Monitor, Roma
Kostis Velonis
Craft Makes the Universe, 2008
Legno, acrilico, roccia, feltro, cera, impiallacciatura, spray, plastica.
300 x 90 x 100 cm
Courtesy l’artista; Galleria Monitor, Roma

http://www.romacontemporary.it/

Figures of Conflict

Details from "Gaining Socialism while Losing your Wife", 2009
Kunstverein in Hamburg

Anna Tokes

Le Cocu magnifique
Budapest, 1924
Mise en scene¨:Arthur Bardos
Anna Tokes dans le role de Stella

Other versions

Le Cocu maqnifique, Bruxelles
Nouveau theatre de Begique, 1987
Mise en scene:Henri Ronse
Decor: Franz Salieri



Le Cocu magnifique, Gand,
Nederlands toneel, 1967.
Mise en scene:Paul Anrieu
Decor:Jan Beekman

Light breaks where no sun shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter's robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.


Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas

Left wing melancholy is going away

Left wing melancholy is going away, 2009
5 m ( height)
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg

Passion for Solitude

I'm eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room's already dark, the sky's starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I'm eating, watching the sky—who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I'm eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining
among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything's still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn't matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn't enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it's in charge.

Cesare Pavese
Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Gaining Socialism while Losing your Wife

Gaining socialism while losing your wife (after Popova's set construction for “Le Cocu magnifique”, 1922), 2007
Installationsansicht Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2009