Contemporary Laboratory: Spectacle conference Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel.  Casa Daros, December 12 2014. Photo: Jessica Gogan

House 10 – Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel

On December 12, 2014, the artists from the Contemporary Laboratory shared their experiments and practices with the public.

’Listening’ is a peaceful act, that’s true. Listening to the silence, the void, but more than that: listening to the other. Our civilization is constantly diminishing the culture of listening, though. It seems to me that our capacities for listening are getting smaller and smaller. The general attention span for everything is cut down, that’s for sure, but most of all for taking things in. We’re led to answer or react or speak up right away.”

Wim Wenders¹ (appropriated by Raphael G Giammattey)

The whole process overflowed on that day. The bodies extended in memory and action expanded as reverberations. I believe this memory impregnated bodies which were or were not aware of what was happening.”

Luiza Coimbra

It wasn’t an aesthetic object that produced the relation among the participants, but the relations among the artists produced more relations. Production of production, relations of relations.”

Antonio Gonzaga Amador

I remember feeling something I didn’t expect to feel that night: anger. Not just any anger, but real anger. When I was finally set free, when that person stopped pushing me, I saw myself shouting, Hey. Not like a person looking for another blindfolded person, but with a deep hatred I felt my Hey getting out of my throat in a guttural sound. I felt it wasn’t a code for finding, but an act of sublimation: since I couldn’t hit the person who pushed me, since this was off the table, since I knew him and had agreed with all that, all I could do was shout.”

Jandir Jr

Out of the shell of exclamation [location for performative poetry reading during the conference] where I stayed for a minute and then left, I could once more displace people, remove them from their home-bodies and select a target: a young man with clefs on his back. Probably a circus artist that without metaphor had made his body into a house. His body remained lightweight while I tried to carry him from one point to another, carefully trying to let him steady on the ground despite the strength of my intervention, demanded by the image of the displacements we were trying to rebuild in that area. He resisted. Something new happened that wasn’t an artistic proposal of ours. There was a conference and there was a spectacle.”

Raphael Giammattey

Even after the end, I don’t know what I was there for or what was the role of my presence amongst more people than I would allow myself to be. During all the encounters, the only thing I knew was that I wasn’t home.”

Beatriz Coelho

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¹ Wim Wenders and Mary Zournazi. Inventare La Pace – Dialogo sulla percezione (original title Inventing Peace: a Dialogue on Perception). Bompiani Overlook, 2013