Around the exhibition Beyond the Frame: image in action
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
OF IMAGES
SOMNIA
Performance: Charlotte Colmant - Video design: Raul Bengheci
Dancers : Julie Hendy, Anne Parichon, Niccolo Orsolani, Alessio Crognale, Antonio Cangiano, Giulia d’Antoni, Charlotte Colmant
Video design - Raul Zbengheci
GO FURTHER
DISCUSSION
Mémoire de l’Avenir - Humanities, Arts and Society, at the invitation of UNESCO World Philosophy Day, propose to reflect on the theme of Ethics and Aesthetics as one in Images and in the Arts.
First Mémoire de l'Avenir invited artists and photographers from the exhibition Beyond the Frame: image in action, alongside curators and scholars, to discuss the roles of images within today's global society and their power of action. L'AiR ARTS, a partner of the exhibition, also presents a performance by the artist Hiie Saumaa, animating the artworks and the gallery space with movement.
To go further on the subject Mémoire de l'Avenir proposes a reflection on the power of the image (Aurore Nerrinck) and on photography and creativity (Margalit Berriet).
Then this inquiry is extended with the relation between image and body language through dance.
SOMNIA is a video performance project by the choreographer Charlotte Colmant in collaboration with Raul Zbengheci. In this artwork the Body and the video are connected to form a visual and sound landscape. SOMNIA is a reflection on the body, on the mind and about encounters in general, within a world where individualism schemes patterns are growing, conditioned by digital technologies.
Fie, fie upon her!
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body. - Ulysses in The History of Troilus and Cressida [1]
To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people. Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show. Martha Graham [2]
Body language - gestures, attitudes, expressions - as a non-verbal (visual) language is a revealer of emotions and an essential tool in establishing contact, to construct relationships, to express emotions and to connect with others.
Body language can be interpreted as proposed information that is fully dependent on the observer.
Body language, nonverbal communication and facial expressions expose feelings and intentions, where human communication is only 30 to 40 per cent verbal and 60 to 70 per cent of paralinguistic cues, or silent signals.[3]
The study of body language is known as kinesics, a branch of anthropology developed by Ray Birdwhistell in the mid-20th century to de-verbalize human communication. Birdwhistell believed that no movement of the human body is accidental and that all of our gestures, down to the tiniest blink, are subject to a grammar that can be studied and analyzed, like any language. To him It's how you looked when you said it, not what you actually said. [3]
Social psychologist Amy Cuddy emphasizes the importance of expansive postures that show dominance and command by opening the frame, just as a photography may dominant a text or a tell.
A conversation can be entirely done with a body language: one needs to “read” the body language of the “other.” Body Language, Mark Rowlands argues is the problem of representation. Rowlands argues that at least some cases of representation need to be understood not in terms of a word but of the perceived action. A body language reflects unique innate personal ways of being mixed with conventional common cultural shared body communication. [4]
Body language can be read and expressed through the Arts, especially through dance. Using the body and emotions, artists ask fundamental questions about our relationship to others and the world.
Choreographer Charlotte Colmant investigates dance as a visual form: through an exploration of the body within its environment. Her artistic work also includes photography, video and site-specific installations. In her project, SOMNIA, Charlotte Colmant dramatizes and visualizes the physical and metaphorical distances between humans caused by technology.
Margalit Berriet - November 2020
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[1] William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Troilus and Cressida Act IV. Scene V. The Grecian Camp. 1609 – The Oxford Shakespeare 1914
[2] Martha Graham in a conversation with the dance critics of The New York Times. 1985, March 31
[3] ‘The Definitive Book of Body Language’ By Allan et Barbara Pease in The New York times - 24 sept 2006
[4] Body Language – Representation in Action published by Bradford Book – 2006
EMBODIED IMAGE
Performance by Hiie Saumaa Video by Chris Lee
presented by L'AiR ARTS
Hiie Saumaa – dancer / choreographer
Chris Lee – videographer, editor
In this video, movement artist Hiie Saumaa performs an embodied exploration of the artworks exhibited at “Beyond the Frame: Image in Action.” Focusing on the work from each of the ten exhibiting artists, Hiie brings bodily sensations, intuitive physical responses, and embodied, somatic wisdom into the experience of viewing art. She animates the artworks and the gallery space with movement. The video presentation draws attention to the importance of physical sensations, kinesthetic imagination, and the dancing mind in how we respond to works of art. At the heart of this project lies the question, "What happens when we respond to visual art by using the whole body? Is there a different kind of knowledge that arises in us when we add movement and dance to how we respond to visual images? What does the experience of this kind of embodied wisdom feel like?"
About Hiie Saumaa
Hiie Saumaa (Ph.D., Columbia), is a dance writer/scholar and movement educator. Her dance writings explore interconnections between dance, movement imagination, and creativity. www.hiiesaumaa.com
About Chris Lee
Born in U.K. Chris Lee is a British photographer and a filmmaker. His work spans multiple disciplines inspired by story archetypes, human values and the collective unconscious. www.thisischrislee.com
In SOMNIA, body and video connect to form a visual and sound lanscape. SOMNIA is a reflection on the body and mind and encounters in general, in a world where individualist patterns are growing.
SOMNIA is a collaborative dance installation/video choreographed by Charlotte Colmant and designed by Raul Zbengheci, dancers interact in a room, surrounded by electronic landscapes, at a very slow pace, looping body forms in repetition and coordination, working the borders between connection and dis- connection, consciousness and unconsciousness.
SOMNIA is a metaphor for the involvement of the human species in a technological world, where the only form of individualism is a solitary one. With mechanical repetitions of motion and dehumanization of emotion, the dancers fall or convulse at moments, as if electrical shocks were occurring in their bodies, as they walk back and forth on defined lines or in circles. They have no escape from constant lights, sounds, and patterns affecting their bodies, feelings, and intuitions.
About Charlotte Colmant
Charlotte Colmant is an artist and choreographer trained at Le Centre des Arts Vivants in Paris and the Martha Graham School in New York City. Colmant researches dance as a visual form, through an exploration of the body in its environment. Her artistic work includes photography, video and site-specific installations where the body is both subject and object. charlottecolmant.com
About Raul Zbengheci is a Romanian-American producer and organizer. If contemporary art and culture functions today as an archipelago comprised of small islands, Zbengheci situates himself in the waters between the islands, following the currents and floating softly between different mediums and influences. He works in the gaps between visual art, contemporary performance, and public, site specific art.Raul Zbengheci is currently the Performance Producer at The Whitney Museum of American Art.He has produced projects with LEIMAY, Performa, MoMA PS1, PROTOTYPE Festival, Times Square Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and The 8th Floor, among others.raulzbengheci.net
IMAGE AND BODY LANGUAGE THROUGH DANCE
Presentation by the artists of their artistic projects
Beyond the Frame: image in action
As a “signifier”, an image can shift ways of seeing and change perceptions. Photography enables a framing of political, societal, and personal narratives through distinct perspectives, providing insight for viewers to gaze through the photographer’s lens and interact with new viewpoints. In doing so, images call into question the position of the artist, and the role they may enact in society.
An image is also an agent of encounters and of dialogue. Its interpretation does not depend solely upon the person who produces it, but also engages the understanding of the person who looks at it. Throughout this cross-dialogue between the photographer and the viewer, an image can open up a multitude of possibilities in the field of experiences, thoughts, and reflections.
The artists propose narratives and experimental processes that bear witness to current environmental and social issues by seeking to portray the mysteries that surround us.
Beyond The Frame: Image In Action is also an exhibition bringing together ten international photographic artists, presented at Mémoire de l'Avenir, from October 17 to November 15, 2020. These artists were selected by a reviewing committee for an international residency in Paris hosted by L’AiR ARTS. The exhibition is held as a collaboration between the artists, L’AiR Arts, and Mémoire de l’Avenir—the Humanities, Arts and Society’s curatorial team and supported by the City of Paris.
SPEAKERS:
Mila Ovchinnikova
Founder and director of L'AiR ARTS.
Margalit Berriet
Founder and director of Mémoire de l’Avenir
Co-director of Humanities, Arts and Society
Marie-Cécile Berdaguer
Head of exhibitions and communication at Mémoire de l’Avenir
Project manager of Humanities, Arts and Society
Raina Lampkins-Fielder
Curator and cultural programmer. She currently serves as a curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation the Atlanta-based nonprofit that documents, preserves, and showcases art by African-American artists of the American South.
Klaus Fruchtnis
Artist, researcher and educator. His projects involve art, technology, cultural, social and political aspects. He is associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Chair of Photography / Transdisciplinary New Media departments at Paris College of Art.
With the visual artists:
Barbara Boissevain - USA
Candice Inc - USA
Chris Lashbrook - Canada
Chris Lee - UK
Peggy Stevenson - Philippines / USA
Sofyan Syamsul – Indonesia
For the artists' bios and presented work view the exhibition catalogue HERE
WHAT POWER HAS AN IMAGE?
by Aurore Nerrinck
Art historian - in charge of the research and mediation department of Mémoire de l'Avenir (Memory of the Future).
TO RE-COMPOSE - TO APPROPRIATE - TO QUESTION - TO TESTIFY
… why then, since man is man - is he an iconophile, and does he feel the need to leave images, to always compose and recompose, to appropriate, interpret and reinterpret the world?
Basically, this quest remains open to an endless questioning, an infinite mystery, which never finds a definitive answer. This gaze, always astonished and always renewed, expresses the very strangeness of being-in-the-world.
The photographer doesn't take a photograph just for himself; he also does it as a guide to witness, for others, for future times, hence collecting traces from the past, traces (authentic or not) of past memories, as if to make sure that these events have indeed taken place, that these people have indeed existed. Is this a palliative to the fear of disappearing - an ontological concern? Is leaving a trace (graph) akin to a victory over the inevitable? Consequently, a presence - photographic - survives. And yet the image proves nothing. Read more
PHOTOGRAPHY AND CREATIVITY
By Margalit Berriet
Artist, founder and director of Mémoire de l'Avenir
Thanks to the French inventors Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, France has been known as the birthplace of photography, and Paris is with no doubt the best historical hub for image- makers!
Photography as the art of the images is tracking movement and light, But Photography is also a way to see, to look, to criticize, to witness, to learn, to investigate, to inform, to state, to manipulate, to distract and to act, to generate new ways of seeing, to compose, to propose, to apply and to get involved…!
Photography is a multidisciplinary arena between the fields of science, communication, documentations, offering, at times, direct and factual information, but most often proposing an angle, a point of view, and therefore somehow generate manipulated perceptions of evidences, that can reflect also opinions, feelings, impressions, and a subjective vision, and by so doing proving infinite points of view of things as of places or of beings.
Images, carry elements of multiples languages, can be addressed to all, although all different, they can share common familiar references of the world. Read more
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