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Kuinka puhua rivien välistä? Kuinka ajatella ei mitään? Kuinka kanavoida kaikkea?
“Mietin sitä hetkeä ja tilaa ja kohtaa joka on käännöksen ja ajatuksen välissä. Tai hetki, jolloin alan puhua ja hetki jolloin alan ajatella käännöstä, kääntämistä. Mitä se on, mitä siinä on. Aion nyt mennä siihen siihen tilaan, siihen väliin. Olen nyt ajatuksen, puheen alkamaisillaan olon ja käännöksenä tapahtuvan puheen välissä. Olen nyt siellä. Tämä on nyt se tila, ja…”
-Emilia Kokko
To speak between the lines
To move sideways in language
To matter
To body
To subject
To texture
To pattern
To speak movement
To speak touch
To speak parallel
To language
To grammar
To almost
In Spring 2017 I invited artists Emilia Kokko and Gesa Piper to join me in developing a practice of thinking aloud that I dubbed ‘channelling’, and the embodied poetics/politics arising from it. This Autumn we were joined by visual designer Anastasia Paretskoi who translates the practice through her own artistic concerns with (trans)subjectivity and space/place.
Channelling is both site and outcome of artistic research. Through collective practice we explore how speech entangles and coagulates laterally. Our attention is as much in clumps, patterns, glitches and absences as continuous flows of presence. In speech-as-texture among other textures, speech-as-stage for performing human/non-human/grammatical/partial bodies and sedimenting subjects in-formation.
Channelling is a durational exploration of the co-constitution of bodies, relations, and grammar in performance.
As my first examined artistic part, Channelling is paired with The Actress, which is a theatre piece on theatre, power, and acting. It presents eight variations on thespian affect, corporeality, representation, labour, agency, identification, empowerment, and techno-assisted embodiment. The Actress is a collaboration with French-Basque theatre director/artist/researcher Vincent Roumagnac.
Työryhmä/Working group: Outi Condit, Emilia Kokko, Gesa Piper, Anastasia Paretskoi (visual design)
The Actress//Channelling had their first performance run in the Theatre Academy of Helsinki in October 2017. There will be more to come, stay tuned!
Photo: Paula Tella