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Remote Vision – a collective reading environment
Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, May 28th 2016.
This immersive poetry reading performance held in German, English, French and Italian by Alessandro De Francesco with other seven performers/readers was hosted by the Kunsthalle Motto Basel bookshop. It is a piece where the text detaches itself from the singular subjectivity of its author and is collectively shared.
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 featured at its core the collective human presence of the readers-performers and the simple resonation of their voices and bodies in the space of the Kunsthalle Basel.
The audience was invited to grab a chair and sit freely in the Kunsthalle bookstore space. All around, eight performers read Alessandro De Francesco's poetry in four 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”.
It is a site-specific reading environment created for the Kunsthalle Basel, co-produced by Solang Production Paris-Brussels. 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:
Rinny Biberstein, Danielle Bürgin, Alessandro De Francesco, Sophie Jung, Clare Kenny, Boah Kim, Simone Lappert, Maureen Senn-Carroll
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.
Original text in Italian by Alessandro De Francesco.
Duration: 30 minutes.
Documentation pictures by Karin Ospelt.
Download an excerpt of the text HERE.
