Pour les étudiant-e-s de 1ère année / 2ème année / 3ème année.

Une exposition regroupant les travaux des étudiants des options (Inter)Action et Info-fiction : Jade Canavesio, Mado Eschenbrenner, Juliette Gampert, Bertille Gervez, Yelim Ki, Alice Kiener, Varun Kumar, Margot Lancon, Jonathan Levy, Alice Oechslin et Myriam Rey dans le cadre du workshop Walk Talk Chapter III The Cyprus Experiment proposé par Ceel Mogami de Haas et Florent Meng

Vernissage le 28 Fevrier 2019 à Thkio Ppalies

 

We will tell you the story of the title in order to understand the story of the workshop and of the exhibition.

So it started with the usual brainstorming.

‘We need a title. The deadline is tomorrow’

‘What!?’

‘Yes bitch, tomorrow’

‘OMG’

‘I know’

‘C’mon, pull your shit together’

‘Okay, hmmm… Okay…. Wait, wait; what do you think of… Hmmm…. Johnnie Walker?’

‘Johnnie Walker…? Are you kidding me? Do we look like a group of fucking winos?’

‘…’

The story goes on. Everyone pulls out their cards and everyone think his or her title is smarter than the other.

But wait… The Johnnie Walker story has an interesting punch line. Well first of all I have to say that we didn’t choose our hostel according to its kitsch interior design. But every hostel has its usual cheap curios scattered around the rooms. In the kitchen of Nexhostel, there is that rather cheap tin advertisement board promoting the equally cheap Johnnie Walker whisky. Based on a lame Chinese proverb it says: ‘Do not be afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still’.Since our project is about walking, one of us thought it could be an appropriate title. Soon a ‘fuck that shit’ was on everyone’s lips. Not before someone told the story of Giacometti who was a remorseless wino apparently. One day in Paris, in a café called the rosebud, sitting with his friend Samuel Beckett (another brilliant wino) staring at an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker, Giacometti suddenly screamed, grasped Beckett’s hand and said ‘Eureka’ (or maybe he said ‘per Dio’). Beckett who was sipping on a large glass of Irishman Single Malt asked him if he finally came to his senses in realizing that the whisky he used to drink was in reality moonshine that would eventually make him blind. Giacometti whose favourite beverages were all bathtub gins ignored his friend’s remark and holding the bottle in his hand said out loud ‘here, that’s what I call a walking sculpture’.

Our whole project is about walking and talking, not walking and drinking, sometimes talking and drinking. We are interested in the similarities (and potentialities) between the act of walking and the speech act: what is said when you stroll around a city? Michel de Certeau beautifully calls this ‘the chorus of idle footsteps’. If there is a chorus, who is listening? Who wrote the music notations? The main exercise of this workshop is to listen to that chorus, to take note of the migrational and metaphoric city that slipped into, under, over the everyday city.

We walked down numerous roads in multiple ways. Some walked and listened to the voices trapped on the walls or buried deep into the fruits. Juicy time (or the possible supremacy of the Nirvana principle) by Varun Kumar is one of these works that translates the walking act into embroidered enunciations. I don’t know by Jade Canavesio, also a work with embroidery, crystallizes her wanderings around Nicosia in search of fabric craftsmen. The Skin of the City by Miriam Rey draws an atlas of observation and emotions based on city façades and territorial texturology. Another more relational work with vegetal material is by a duo of artists; Margot Lançon and Mado Eschenbrenner developed a work –Buffer Food- around different edible plants found in the buffer zone of Nicosia -the plants are then cooked and distributed to the public, their art work is ingested, digested and ultimately egested long (or short) after the exhibitions ended. Bad Buoy by Bertille Gervez translates international code of floating signals into a playful installation choreographing visitors gestures and positions within the exhibition space. You can access by Yelim Ki is almost a curatorial proposition: the exhibition space is turned into an archaeological excavation site relating to the Benjaminian idea that the act of remembering resembles the act of digging. Looking for Dimitri by Alice Kiener and Alice Oechslin (aka Aalice) is a performance/lecture/concert merging story telling, geography and algorithmic music composition into an ethereal work of art. The stream doesn’t care by Jonathan Levy is an analyse of the Cypriot landscape from a molecular point of view: his video work doubled by what we would call ‘stream of consciousness poetry’ tries to objectify and reify a reality often overlooked.  Exhale by Juliette Gampert is a work that relates her encounter with a Cypriot Dance Hall choreographer and teacher (Andia Nicolaou from Afro Dance), developing on the difficult relationships between dance and politics, tension and expression.

  Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng

Nicosia, February 28^th, 2019