Dear T.,
let me try to be more accurate about the project.
There is some theatrical aspect of course; it refers to the ‘live’ performance only, to a single element not to the entire environment of the installation; its final configuration should include the recorded voice, declaiming both texts, as well as the structure with the clouds, the desk lit by the lamp, and a large scale projection - no sound - of the man greeting the public, either coming or leaving. This echoes a work I made years ago in Venice (2004) consisting of a wall paper showing a migrant winding his watch and two neon signs, one at the entrance, one at the exit, saying “welcome” - “goodbye”.
The actual performance is, as it originally was, a lecture. The actor’s function is to emphasize what’s happening as something belonging to former times no longer existing.
So, in the same way the Jukebox evening at Kolbe was not a concert but the memory of all the concerts one may have listened to, this lecture has to do specifically with culture and its transmission. While the project is suggesting that culture is rooted in the past, it affirms that its means of transmission is all that remains: method as opposed to culture, where culture elicits violence in thinking.
Right now, I am reconsidering if the second text, that is mine, should be a fictional one (my first option) or a sort of diary or personal reflections. I think the latter is the right solution, for a certain level of anarchism related to the individual is the only way to escape conformist and useless acknowledgements.
From this point of view, there should be a distinction between the voice that talks, the Roland Barth text, and the other voice, a difference between the past and the present; two timbres of voice. This could be obtained by the same actor or through a second actor, one sitting at the desk, one standing within the audience.
A possible alternative: the actor at the desk talks while the second voice is a recorded one. In this case, the ‘final configuration’ will include just this second recorded voice, while culture, missing, will be represented only by the object, clouds and desk, and the greeting video projection.
If this is not what you were expecting, I’ll understand. Please consider the economic effort that I would
undertake, notwithstanding the project may be installed for only a short time, as a measure of my commitment to it.
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