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Remote Vision – a collective reading environment

Shot in one take at the Brussels Museum of Art & Design (ADAM), Belgium, on 22 November 2016.

Camera and editing: Gen Ueda

 

 

This immersive poetry reading performance held in English, French, Dutch, German, Swedish and Italian by a group of performers/readers was filmed by Language Art Studio assistant Gen Ueda at the Brussels Museum of Art & Design (ADAM) on November 22th 2016, for the Art Contest 2016 finalists' exhibition.

Alessandro De Francesco has been developing for several years what he calls “reading environments”, i.e. installations and performances based on text and spoken voice. Differently to previous reading environments, this piece doesn’t make use of digital voice processing and is not based on one reading voice only: it rather features at its core the collective human presence of the readers-performers and the simple resonation of their voices and bodies in space.

Besides this film, the performance was realized two times live at the ADAM. The audience was invited to grab a chair and sit freely in the middle of a circle formed by the performers reading Alessandro De Francesco's poetry in several languages, sometimes simultaneously.

Remote Vision – a collective reading environment inscribes itself in the series of iconoclastic acts and interventions defined by Alessandro De Francesco as “Language Art” and “poetry as artistic practice”.

Remote Vision was initially conceived as a site-specific reading environment created for the Kunsthalle Basel and it is co-produced by Solang Production Paris-Brussels and the Language Art Studio. Remote Vision – a collective reading environment has been conceived in the occasion of the recent release of the book Remote Vision. Poetry 1999-2015 (New York: Punctum Books, 2016), gathering in a bilingual English-Italian edition the majority of Alessandro De Francesco’s poetry and conceptual writing produced so far. The texts contained in this book were also published in France in two separated volumes (Redéfinition, Paris: MIX., 2010 and La Vision à distance, ibid., 2015) and partially in Italy (Lo spostamento degli oggetti, Verona: Cierre Grafica, 2008 and Ridefinizione, Rome: La Camera Verde, 2011), as well as in journals in German (lyrikline.org; Poetenladen.de, etc.) and other languages.

Performers/Readers:

Ingrid Bourgault, Eugène Champoin, Inca Garnica, Bruno Hardt, Jeanne-Marie Huet, Juliette Le Monnyer, Giordava Vedova (students at the École de Recherche Graphique and La Cambre Visual Arts in Brussels).

Translators:

Into English: Belle Cushing and Dusty Neu.
Into German: Roberto Di Bella, Angela Sanmann.
Into French: Doriane Bier, Alessandro De Francesco, Laurent Prost, Emilio Sciarrino, Fabien Vallos, Noura Wedell, Caroline Zekri.
Into Dutch: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Oei Swan Ien.
Into Swedish: Gustav Sjöberg.

Original text in Italian by Alessandro De Francesco.

Duration: 45 minutes.

 

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