7 Abiku solos for 11 scenes falling through
Keywords: contamination, transversal research , interdisciplinary, colonialism, ghosts, interspecies entanglements
7 Abiku solos for 11 scenes falling through Is a research project centered on the unique cosmology of the microbiotic world that brings to foreground interspecies entanglements : ghosts, birds, bacterias …It mingles a personal story; forgotten and erased memories with a sensation encarved in the guts. In this speculative fabulation the past is not located behind; in this sense , we can create and change the narratives that have been taught to us. As if it was possible to make an ontological shift, walking backwards to the future and starring towards the past.It means that the past is ahead of us, you can acknowledge it, but the future, however, is not knew because it is behind, in the back. The understanding is that time is not lineal and that history is not factual. How to bring to foreground the complexity of the colonial modernity ongoing process by dismantling hegemonic systems of knowledge? How to challenge language and it’s legitimation through the use of pseudo scientific and technological discourse that contributes to the obliteration of cosmologies and worlds? In this way, the research proposes a transversality of languages and disciplines intersecting a scientific vocabulary with images and allegories to dismantle/shake the fixed structures of power and unveil invisible and neglected ones. This intersectionality happens through the contamination of the proposals in hybrid formats and non-linearity, an open and exponential system that enables a mediation with a more diverse public in relation to backgrounds, heritages, ages, race, gender; integrating different capacities and communication skills. Expanding meanings: saying names in many languages, evoking contra narratives, casting spells, retelling stories, crossing medias and using technologies to open translations procedures .
Contamination might be the main key of this essay as a radical alternative of the sanitization, and hygienic condition stated in the current times. In the research I describe myself as a bacteria - because I come from a highly contagious environment, far from the aseptic conditions that is expected of a solo artist bound to a studio. As a bacteria, I find it very easy to mutate and coexist: I adapt to insalubrious environment without difficulty, in an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions. All throughout my body of work, I highlight the productive difference between the in vivo and the in vitro condition used in scientific discourse in the entanglement of different technologies, to imagine choreographic devices in collaboration. By consistently balancing the artificial ("in vitro") environment of a studio with ("in vivo") engagements in public spaces I am attempting to create a diverse set of artistic works that reverberates in cross contamination procedures expanding audience and specific artistic disciplines.
After being outdoors in a long embodied learning experience of becoming bacteria the artistic proposal now deals with the captivity condition of the studio; indoors. What remains is the super power of reproduction of the bacterias , the transmutation reproductibility, always becoming others, never alone.
The multiplicity allows that one becomes more in a glimpse; a condition of not belonging to the body or not being one. The bacteria do not exists alone it is a trans individual by meaning.
“…transindividuality happens in the situation in which the individual suspends the function of its (interindividual) relations to the others, or, in other words, disindividualizes itself by putting itself into question, by forcing itself to become aware of what in itself is more-than-individual. “
The sound composition and spatialization in the piece makes possible to navigate through all the different technologies, it serves as a key to open up portals. The sound it mediates the speculative fabulation , it bridges the audience and non-humans; bacterias, ghosts and birds . The voicing out loud aims to make a highly access open system with many entrances. The language includes lower tones and high pitches, stresses fixed spaces of knowledge and regimes of visibility, cracking the hierarchies. The characteristics of digitalization of space shape sour ways of working ,thinking and being and the language here bridges us back to an embodiment experience. It highlights the apnea as a analogical way of sharing the invisible , it forecast spell that are not intelligible, it address that translation is always a loss .
The piece 7 Abiku solos for 11 scenes falling through is the result of the master in Choreography at DAS Graduated School I am assuming that sound is used to “glue” the pieces together and create the atmosphere. The contamination is the methodology for a collective creation process ; an interspecies ecology in between Flavia Pinheiro, Leandro Olivan, Tom Oliver ,Khris ,Misha, Chakirou. Mario Lopes, Rodrigo Batista, Ana Lira, Willem, Eric Lint ,Jakob Povel, Emanuel and others, more than humans and invisibles voices.
The collective was made in an assemblage with virtual presence of Jakob, with the previous experience together with Chakirou intertwining places , cosmologies, languages and technologies.
An immaterial knowledge has been built ; enchantments and spells gathered through body practices, conversations, reading, listening , being and eating together, surrounded by the invisible and in a wake of the past as an absent presence. A secret hidden in between the words and its translations, a code that cannot be deciphered. An important part of the work was materialized in sound , sometimes harmonic, sometimes textual, sometimes rhythmic, sometimes digital, sometimes written, sometimes dissonant and chaotic: whistles, voices, screaming, murmurs, apneas, whispers , in a format of a podcast, an installation and a music composition for a live performance.
I am not going to focus in the technical aspects, but in the crossing between them , half of the crew was there to make this happen. Nevertheless, tools become obsolete, while new ones are perpetually born, but the elements of the performance can remain the same. Although I believe it interesting to say that the images data base in the begging of the process was a very complicated and extended decision making process. Some of us were standing for the importance of having “real scientific images of bacterias” to be used , others believed that the images would be just a representation of scientific o allegory to dismantled perception and humanity.
Making Science instead of art
Empirical sciences often pride themselves of being devoid of a subject - while they are in fact highly fictional, narrative-based research fields. From the vantage point of an artist, the evolutionary story can be consider a fable, and the whole field of empirical science a violent fabulation in which (as history shows), some lives are inherently devaluated over others. In the realm of this particular fable, the in vitro condition reverberates across all domains of scientific discourse and practice: characters such as petri dishes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, compasses, green houses and zoos fill the stage – in an ongoing attempt to capture and catalogue nonhuman subjects. The attempt is to highlight the entangled, violent effects of this fable: What is true in a microcosmic, micropolitical way is also true in a macropolitical way. Bacterias, for example, are able to change the surroundings and transform their environment to a living, breathing, vital life. However, when they are captured, this is no longer the case. An in vitro condition, in other words, is a slow death for all life forms. The aim of the project was through the lenses of a subject whose existence has been attempted to be captured, to tell the story from the opposite vantage point: That of a vibrant, dancing bacteria who refuses these conditions of captivity, that insists on staying alive through a choreography of contamination. It is searching for the re-enchantment of the world through an entanglement with microorganisms, to dismantle the evolutionary tale of humanity towards decolonizing nature. To resist to systems of knowledge and the regimes of invisibility ,the micro politics of bacterias as a metaphor to the grammar of exclusion in the patriarchal , colonialist, capitalist macro system. This microscopic study investigates the ever-changing dialogue between a bacterial body as material - bone and flesh and imagination as an invisible, intangible, immaterial. The sound was a creation of an specific ecosystem of practices, which aims to learn from bacterias to accelerate the metabolism, activate the immunological system, transform our visions, contaminating each other and create a dissonant community of cells that, unbalanced, moves together without a purpose exploring the thin line between bacterial growth and inactivation focusing on some emerging bacterial survival strategies, both from an individual cell and from a population perspective.
The fable unveils the mechanism of living while in a state of being sequestered from Life with all its colonial(ist) anti-biotic, anti-zootic impulses and implications, and creating dances with a broader engagement is , nevertheless, moving at the edge of an impossibility. To continue to develop the research on the fine life between representation and the anti-colonial(ist) imperative to detonate with the very logic that makes possible even to conceive that such entrapment could ever make any sense at all; is the radical turn of this process.. How to get totally rid of any “genre of the human” that posits captivity, hollowed-out life, anti-biotic being, living in vitro, as the only mode of understanding the living?
It is quite easy to draw a connection between this experiments and the fascination that people have with the audiovisual experience, when connecting to narrative storytelling, through the fabulation the scattered connections can be made also by the audience.
Fragments, complexity discontinuity, non linearity , sound visuality, meanings, multiplicities
I will share the written text , the audio file and the score of this fable, a performative installation named “7 Abiku solos for 11 scenes falling through” ; an in vitro experiment, that merges sounds, texts, images and movement in an attempt to engage the audience in an imagination of the unborn. Is the language and the translations that a address urgencies in macrostrutures by the use made out of it.
“This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to aIl the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the fulliload of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone. "
The trans-disciplinary approach relates to the search of how to make visible and heard different languages, voices, times and spectrality's. The choice to dive into multiple medias was to hack the system of perception with analogical and digital devices in transduction procedures to complexify the meaning and the affective relations with the audience.
For the philosopher Simondon, transduction refers to a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities
Shifting the materiality of the experience into a plurality of voices, languages and devices to aim the questions: How to communicate with ghosts? How to materialize the sensations and memories embodied in our guts, remembered by bacterias and tissues through out generations? How can different technologies expand the experience and allow our imagination to complex associations?How a critical speculative fabulation can address the embodiment of the unborn towards contamination procedures that could fractured and dismantled sovereignty within neoliberalism fostering the emergence of super-bacterias?
I will tell you a story.
It seems that the new science research results shows that individuals with an imbalance in bacteria, with a ratio favoring harmful to healthy bacteria, were more likely to have the Alzheimer's signature. I wish I could tell you my dream, but I must tell you a story about a forced choreographic displacement. About memories stolen by colonialism that caused forgetfulness and loss in the transatlantic endless journey of no return. It is about imagining the past based in partial traces and opaque connections between an oral tradition , the presence of the Males at the port region in Recife ; where my mother spent her life and the magic realm of the Abikus in Ouidah. Tells the legend, that a pregnant women was wondering around the baobab tree in an enchantment realm. Due to her sorrow and pain, her soul sunk in tears and sadness allowed the spirits inside her unborn child.An after property life of oppression, silence and annihilation takes place.Nothing has been left. She forgot everything. She can not drawn a clock due to an impairment of the frontal cerebral lobe; time has vanished away. An atomic disrupting attentional in the cerebral network.Thus, the present mingles disconnected events from the past in the future. After all, time belong to whom ? The research was an attempt to find refuge to this stolen life.
Inside/out
In the first room, this story was materialized through a transduction procedure using sound, spoken words, and written texts. 700 black feathers and 3 fans. An attempt to protect a memory , a hidden secret, a spell undecodified , an immaterial story of the Abiku and the field research in Benin. The installation with 12 LCD screens was programed by Leandro Olivan and the sound/ text composition plays with the overlapping of translations. The use of repetition, empty spaces on the screens , different font sizes, and a delay between what we see and hear were some materials used to foster this experience; a complex machine of perceptions where we full the spectators linear reading comprehension. On the screens you have words, sentences, letters, graphics and sometimes only a glitch that overlaps the multiple layers of sounds and noise emerging from the speakers.
TEXTS
7 Abiku solos with 11 bacteria falling through
Such a long night in the forest
Such a long night away from forest
____
« Être un ABIKU n’est pas une fatalité. La fatalité est de croire qu’être un Abiku en est une. C’est là, la grande Ignorance »
____
I want to tell you a story about my past/future
Need trauma
Wish I could life/ death
Must mother
Will Companion spirit
Never Curse
____________________
Being an ABIKU is not a fatality.
Reality
Between frustration and celebration
Remembrance and forgetful nees.
I belong to the disembodied entities,
spirits who live in a parallel world.
My mother lay down under the Baobab
to take refuge
Days of pain follow one another
"baobab", the sacred tree,
the nest of all spirits,
She uttered angry expressions
She uttered words of pain that gradually made her energy dirty
So angry; she didn't realize that she was surrounded by beings of magic
In the spirit world
some feed on the tears of our tears
others on the tears of our joys,
others on our negative or positive thoughts
____________
Je ne suis jamais seule car les miens sont toujours avec moi et me suivent partout
_____
the atmosphere of the forest settles in with the calls of birds and animals of several species.
___________
You belong to the disembodied entities, spirits who live in a parallel world.
a child who is born with the intention of not lasting.
____
Emi " Bànjókò " Stay (sit) by my side
Emi " Yemiitan " Stop deceiving me
Emi " Kòkúmó̩ " This one will not die
Emi " Dúrojaiyé " Stay and enjoy life
_________
powerful spirits
Encantados
Forgive me my silence
nightly adventures in the forest
Like my shadow, I sense you
_______________
Comme si mon âme chante ibéré, Imon ; Iwa ;
Between irokos, baobas
Entre mundos que não podem desaparecer
they incarnate into a child
Who came to this world
Into the mother's womb.
Coming back again and again
“born-dead”
asphyxiated ,
stillborn
Breathless
An attempt to survive in apnea
An absent presence
______
The ones who have not been born yet.
Who Will never be born
Who Will die right after birth
Many of us/ them with no rights to live
Mon adrénaline monte :
colère, tristesse, anxiété, arrogance sont au rendez-vous !
my system is always corrupted
(Disease- Epidemic- Inaction Bacterias , virus malaria, tetanuns, salmonela )
I received then a very violent blow, mine are always of good mood,
It was necessary to appease them,
chained them and fed them
so that they stop being a handicap with my return and my success.
The captive born bird
The angry bird who can not fly
FIGHT - FIGHT -FIGHT - FIGHT- FIGHT
V- I -O-L-E-N- C-E
Violence
Rage rage rage rage rage
Vomitando depois de nausea, cólera e dor
To stop this cycle of births and deaths, your parents will have to perform certain rites to make the spirit forget its world of origin and to keep death away,
The first spirit that comes to me in my trance was a beautiful soul
A- Disguised and wearing a costume and a mask on which is written the letter "A" Akôkôkù (the first dead)
B- The second one with the same costume on which is written in bold the letter "B" Banjoko (sits with me)
I- The third belongs to the rank of spirits 'I' inscribed on his back Ikukôhê (death has refused you)
K- The fourth has the letter 'K' Kokumo (Do not die any more) on his back
U- The fifth has the letter "U" on his back, without a name or definition, he walked with his head
The five spirits brought together finally gave my identity.
Still in my trance,
I could not hold back from shouting loudly
A-BI-KU,
which had such an echo that the earth, the heavens and all that constitutes them relayed my voice and that of babalawo, which coincided exactly with mine; so I came back to myself for a few seconds and then ......
the re-enchantment of the world through technologies
The second room entails an immersive performative score with touch design programming to visualize bacterias through generative art and three live performers embodying bacterial behaviors.In the body you have troublemakers, errors, defaults disobedience and restless insistence. It is about an inversion acknowledging that human bodies are colonized by bacterias and microorganism. When the body fabulates a non-human to become, a gender technology mingled with non hieraquical relation of the tissues to evoke the invisible that has not yet been born throughout devices that shifts the spacial notions ,the inner / outside perception, the verticality, the bottom up ,the anus instead of the head, a tentacular creature, a monster in a crossroad with species, in apnea. There is no air. The ontogenetic interfaces of the parasympathetic control allows the unknown to take place, the unborn to become . There Is also a disruptive bird. The drive is to materialize and give shape to non hegemonic voices to imagine cosmological futurities that bring ways to collaborate for a radical aesthetic approach theoretically and poetical grounded in anti-racism, anti colonial anti patriarchalist to rethink the archives, the undocumented , the original narratives towards repatriation, reparation and restitution. Abiku was meant to build a public machine to acknowledge non humans as an art of living in disruption, the art of surviving in the other way round of the art of living. We worked ina cross academy in IDLab, with a light designer, sound designers, programmers and performers. This complex constellations was a decision to expand collaborations and interdisciplinary reaching diverse audience , a performative engagement to open up different access, through a diverse encounter.
To understand a strong opposition of the world of living and the world of dead in the western cosmology to which I belong ,to mingle migration impossible choreographs of humans and non humans in states of survival. I focused in technologies of forgetting and remembering to speculate about an ontological radical turn between bacterias, birds and spirits.
Édouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation (1990), reminds us that "difference in itself can still succeed in reducing things to the domain of the Transparent”. The proposal is to work as an ensemble whereas thinking promotes a shared unknowability that breaks through the dialectical limits of opacity and transparency.
The research was an attempt to fabulate about my mother’s past history , grief and forgetting. I went to Benin in West Africa in a field research trying to track back if it was possible to understand the meaning of abiku, and spiritual journey to face the ghosts of my heritage and the unnamed and undocumented past of my mother’s.
It has been a “permanent decolonization of thought,” quoting Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.It might be a complex network of interspecies relationships and ghostly string figures combining methods of doing , telling stories, thinking thoughts, making dances, creating images, decolonizing gestures , unlearning references , training to die and to forge ( in ) discipline.
With Abiku we would like to share the potential of fabulating narratives, a pathway of self- discovering and reconstruction that allow an openness to communicate to the unborn, to more than humans in a listening procedure. This process converges to a deep reflection of the ongoing colonization technologies and all the neoliberal power dynamics when it presents a gap, a portal to the world of those who have not yet been born, as a breath of hope , I present us with a world to come.
The unborn fabulates into micro cosmologies and micro politics a documentation speculation, a solo score with resistance, celebration, repetition, shapeshifting, rage, anger, air, ocean a crossroads bacterias and ghosts.
Text and sound.
comment
this creepy soothing voice welcoming people to kill themselves (towards the middle) “the intestinal tract… diversity…. take your finger up and insert it inside the person next to you.”
Welcome to the dark world of invisible microorganism. To make science instead of art
A simple life of a single cell.
Transmitting to humans and non-humans and all those almost alive. It concerns the spectrality presence of ghost , the actual war but the borders that stands between the captive and their freedom, they can never be successfully crossed. For those who do not exist yet, those who were not born and all imaginary, imagined beings, including those who have disappeared.
For all who have had their existence captured by the world of data digitalization and to remember that movement never stops.
Stop Stop Stop .
Close your eyes. Imagine an existence without a core, a breath without air, a world of adaptive possibilities of survival, permeability, super fast reproduction power, transmutation and membrane resilience. Good luck!
…
In vitro is Latin (the Golden language of Science) for “within the glass.” When something is performed in vitro, it happens outside of a living organism.
You have just entered this bacterial experiment where proportions, scales and constellations matter for everything we can perceive, imagine and realize,
This is an in vivo experiment. An ongoing, hopeless fight against the antibiotic forces that surround us from all sides.
Bacterias are able to change the surroundings and transform their environment to a living, breathing, vital life. However, when they are captured, this is no longer the case. An in vivo condition is a slow death for all life to be and to come.
The cecum is a pouch within the peritoneum that is considered to be the beginning of the large intestine.] It is typically located on the right side of the body (the same side of the body as the appendix, to which it is joined). The word cecum is latin for blind.
The oldest life on the planet that speaks to you is more than 3.5 billion years old!
Humans did not know of our existence until 1674 ...even though the human body is made up of 10 times more bacteria, than human cells!
Since the time of the bacterial discovery we have been plundered and looted, displaced in petri dishes across the globe, ambient bodies in isolation in an ongoing spectacle. This stage show is available 24/7. Unable to sleep, we remain in a continuous and perpetual motion.
If we organized ourselves into a protest lined up membrane to membrane, end to end, we’d span about 10 billion light years. That's the distance from here to the edge of the universe.
No wonder we are exhausted, yet you never hear us complain. And yet we never stop
(But not all of us has been discovered yet)
Become superbug! The possible alternative in the fight against antibiotics.
Be a superbug!
Be a queerbacteria, nanobacteria divabacteria, transbacteria, necrobacteria, cyberbacteria, pornobacteria,
Make your own bacteria, Do It Yourself. Stick together:
Bacteria manifest as a new microscopic, unhealthy way of life. If now we are three, there will soon be three million of us. And when the good bugs go bad you better run for your life.
We bacteria have developed a great resilience to antibiotics ( like u )and
if there is a future ... we'll be there.
To overcome the tradition of silence
is a contra attack movement
A choreography of insistence, resilience , repetition and accumulation. IN VITRO
Captive drawing fugitivities
emphasizing multi- species
Entanglements
Bacterias mingled with a bird in cholera.
Petri dishes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, compasses A complex microbial choreography
In which the (non) humans are a tiny part A state of Refusal
to make the revolution irresistible
In an absent presence
When the storm glitches with slippery memories. In between Forgetfulness and Remembrance
In the spirit world,
some feed on the tears of our tears;
drawing their pain in the air
A vortex an uncontrolled acceleration The (non) Future of Art Research intertwined with profiles , zoo catalogues, green houses, apes and birds A spiral of interspecies interdependence. assemblages fractals noninfectious inflammatory contamination of a harmful bacteria Not belonging to your own body Fighting against pathogenic intruders parrots , quakers, parakeets, and macaws. Crossing the borders flying With a broken wing and withered feathers In a Violent disruption Through out dominant immunological hygiene whiteness Bleach The illness of all times
CONTAMINATION NOW
the composition of the gut microbiota Memories for forgetfulness.
AFFECTS the insulin resistance
Antibiotics
The recruitment for micro colony formation Swimming in the Hippocampus
Diving in the cerebral cortex
A Microbial shift
Into the cerebrospinal fluid
That tears up the tissue
An alveolar bone loss memory
outer membrane
IN VITRO
Mediates invasion and colonization of host cells
IN VIVO
The gut and the brain are deeply interconnected autonomic pathways,
modulating permeability,
Traumas (dis)located in
The gastrointestinal tract
Attempts to survive in apnea
Glimpsed of puking
(de) formations pedagogies transmission cross-seeding
The unstoppable troubling spirits
Somersaults , levitates , turn their heads, tear theirs limbs apart
Shattering the edges
A restless soul Unsettled
Scattered desires
walking between
Irokos, baobabs and other big trees of the forest, by magic a wind carries me I belong to the disembodied entities,
the countdown began,
fractures of the deconstructed, erased, disrupted, denied memories. The endless no return.
I am ABIKU
The wondering soul
Dance to not die
The unborn
SCORES
The unstoppable troubling spirits
I am ABIKU, The unborn
A crossroads
Of despair and celebration
Becoming a flock of birds
The endless path of no return.
- Audience in- everything dark, performers whistling insistently with back and forth movement that stretches time, evoking the invisible and opening the space through the silenced voices of spirits
- Moving around a petri dish , 7 circles crossing movement ontogenical patterns : crawling,
- Fast and short movements of bacterias (Live performers ) -the spleen produces antibodies for a counter attack, purple color, fighting back the invasion Transformation and Transport- let go the air ( in front of the screen 2 bacterias - behind another angry one)
- The “characters” individual bacterias appear on the screen ( they are more soft- light- transparent than the violent ones that we saw live, they shift, and float)
- Migration movements- very fast head movements like birds- switch gazes between objects, perceive depth, and switch between lateral and frontal viewing, minimal eye movement they have while observing their surroundings. Attentive state of the live bacterias.
- The bacterias on the screen also start moving fluently touching each other
- Flock of birds- contamination bacterias procedures, reproduction on the screen and live. The music is building up and the bacterias transmutated.
- Free fall- falling under the sole influence of gravity building up something that will be destroyed - score for the performers
- Constrictions in apnea that develops an inversion , a radical shift, bottom up- “music someone”. ( Front space full of smoke and dry ice - only one performer)
- Volcanic explosion - destruction of brain cells CAOS
Bibliografohy
RIVERA Cusicanqui, Silvia. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010.
Glissant,poetics of relations
Simondon, Gilbert. On the mode of existence of technical objets. Minneapolis: Univocal publishing 2017.
Bojana Cvejić, 2016, “In States of Transindividuality” in STATE STATE STATE, Fiksdal, I.M., Petersen C.J. (eds), Oslo: Samizdat.
