Material Reading
lecture performance and dialogue on language-based artistic research
in collaboration with Aleksandra Komsta
2023
Material Reading is a lecture performance, creating a space for practicing artistic research and using performance as a method of doing so within the actions and thoughts manifested. It is a dialogue existing within the borders of sharing research and sharing to / as research.
Among auto-theory, exchanged thoughts, and literature, our points of departure are processes of asemic writing and heat scanning, which open up a conversation about language existing outside of words in material and sonic transformation. We approach our mother tongues, noticing both their deficiencies and potential to convey what might not be easy or possible to express in the language that we communicate with each other. Through the exchange of experiences, personal stories, and observations related to our material practice and how we perceive verbal communications - written or spoken, we try to navigate different understandings and feelings toward what might be said/written/thought/silent/unspoken. Seeing grammar as partially a medium of power, we put in doubt a correctness of the language, making space for slips of the tongue, mistakes, mispunctuations and misunderstandings, that take us somewhere else in our dialogue
and leaves space for other ways of languaging to emerge.
The performance becomes a collision of such processes of doing research without one fixed result, but allowing research to stay non-linear and ongoing. Situating knowledge as being relational and giving up upon the idea of claiming knowledge and instead revisiting it and giving it an auto-theoretical context through correspondence.
The space moves into an installation in such a process, as the dialogue is given a material visual form as it unfolds through the performance. In the end, each space of a performance is an on-growing archive on its own.
The after-moment becomes a moment of being in dialogue with the audience itself and extending our reading into a moment of allowing a multitude of readings to co-exist.
