D plus one "The random movement of particles suspended in a fluid."

The footage was taken Wednesday 29th of December 2010 from 10 am to 01 pm.
research and presentation WIELS residency 2012

What do we observe?

The setting is the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. ECX is the current centre of control of this new installed Ethiopian market system. Ethiopia today ranks n°5 in the world list of emerging countries by producing primary physical goods (commodities).

Stories, rumours and attitudes

In Ethiopia we started a series of observations, encounters and dialogues with people connected in some way or another with the new founded ECX and the Ethiopian economy. We were looking for relations between macro statements (about a country, a population, a group) and micro experience.

The project challenges our self-awareness and our (in)capacity to critically evaluate the things we perceive.

What do we observe?

Economics.

Macro-statements and micro-reality.
If Ethiopia ranks n°5 in the world list «emerging countries forecast 2011» we have to conclude that this forecast is a primarily a macro-statement from an economical perspective. How is this condition of acceleration reflected in the country? How does this macro-statement relate to the country’s current micro-reality?A whole scaled down to snatches.

What do we observe?

#01 photo (Dominik Daggelinckx) taken at Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia December 2010

We are in the spaces of the ECX in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We see trade on the trading floor of the exchange. We see a carpeted, octagonal space with buyers in kacki and sellers in green. The images are uniform. There is action both in foreground and background. The images are both equal and in constant change.

The project drifts on an observation of details and a constant inversion between foreground and background, between subject and context.

What do we observe?

The interview:
Bharat Kulkarni, Senior manager trading operations, explains the ECX model.
It’s a didactic presentation of an economic model (a macro-model). The attention drifts towards the rhetoric of the presentation, his vocabulary, his choice of words, his accent, the speed of speech.

What do we observe?

The research has a wide scope. By observing the footage already taken, links are created to possible other topics, areas and disciplines to find interesting matches.

ONOMATOPEE
Mai 29 between 3-6 pm
Onomatopee office & projectspace
Bleekstraat 23
5611 VB Eindhoven
The Netherlands
FoAM
June 3
FoAM vzw
Koolmijnenkaai 30-34
1080 Brussels
Belgium

The City of Illusions

©2011, Fanny Zaman

audio/video piece
11:11 min.


In 1991 the Empire collapsed. In the video piece we hear the documented confession (from 2011) of a former civilian of the Soviet Empire talking about “something”, which is not revealed to the viewer. The images we do see are few, looped and slowed down, all shot in Moscow 2001. Does a body still possess information of a former time period and how does it disclose? By erasing the subject (of the confession) from the confession we tried to reproduce speaking bodies. We tried to disclose only the essential information stored in the body.

The samples taken at an interval of 10 years: the collapsing (1991), the images (2001) and the confession (2011) set out the psychological process of unfolding. The elements are placed in position and put in a state of latency. By doing this they become very open screens for projection.

Book and DVD release

price: 20 euro

contact and order: trope-editions@gmail.com

limited edition: 300

Book and DVD release

PART01 SONG MOUNTAIN AREA THE CENTRE DIRECTION presents a portrait of a mountain. The mountain is situated in the Chinese district Dengfeng in the centre of Henan province. The mountain is holy and the area "energetic" and famous for its martial arts tradition.

The mountain base is inhabited and the surrounding area is mainly a mining district. This combination of activities, this coalition of dust and bodies, is it coincidental, collateral or merely a minor detail in the eternal realms of Chinese cosmology?

THE CENTRE DIRECTION is a critical portrait of a mountain at the crossroad of rumours, facts and choreography.

With contributions of Jean-Pierre Rehm (F) and Leslie de Vries (B)

author: Fanny Zaman (B)

publisher: a.pass

book 48 pages

DVD: 37 min.

ISBN: 978-94-90500-0-23

price: 20 euro

contact and order: trope-editions@gmail.com

limited edition: 300

Checkpoint Charlie

Video 04:09
in collaboration with Alejandro Petrasso

Sunday
21st of June 2009
10:30 am
Checkpoint Charlie is the most photographed spot in Berlin.
Question:
What do you capture here?

The startingpoint of the project was our interest in the relation between the material setting (the data) of Checkpoint Charlie and the stories this setting generated by its visitors.

1.What concreet material makes up the setting?
2.Which stories does the material of the setting generate?


 

Video piece by Fanny Zaman and Alejandro Petrasso made in the context of the lab in In-transit performance festival Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

"I ACT WITH THE CUP, THE CUP DOESN'T ACT WITH ME!" 2010

Fanny Zaman

This piece is named after a quotation I came across during my stay in a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies)
“I ACT WITH THE CUP, THE CUP DOESN’T ACT WITH ME!”

Triple piece: “I ACT WITH THE CUP, THE CUP DOESN’T ACT WITH ME!”
Section 1 Sound Piece Monologue: voice Iuliana Varodi
Section 2 Video Piece: a.pass participants
Section 3 Interactive Performance: Kelly, Ana, Adva, Dominik, Birgit, Marcello and perhaps you?

The piece “I ACT WITH THE CUP, THE CUP DOESN’T ACT WITH ME!” is composed out of fragments taken from the 12 month research environment a.pass itself and was represented, replayed on in the context of Re-ject, E-ject in deSingel in Antwerp.

The piece examples how I deal with “material” and how I replay that material on an artistic platform.

The material I choose to work with comes out of social environments, habitats, closed systems. I observe setting, words, tone, timing, gesture and arrangement.

My focus lay on basic questions like: What is rhetorical? What is attention? What is performative? How are narrations generated? These questions are aimed at all the elements that make up a setting as it is.

By observing words, tone, timing, gesture and arrangement I often finds beauty in the hypnotic economics that reveal themselves over time. In this triple experimental piece I reframe and rearrange some of the observed elements mentioned above to sense once more the effect of them.

Does the words once spoken, the gestures once made in a certain setting save and pass information of that original setting when you replay them in a different place and time, in a different set up? Is the information once inscribed part of the air they breath? Or do they transform that information? How in which way? Is there something that remains unchangeable?

I observe how different actors and different platforms organize their environments and how the environment organizes the actors. My perspective is based on the assumption that a certain setting is made up by the mutual inscription of all the elements involved in that setting.

Therefore the seemingly meaningless quote “I ACT WITH THE CUP, THE CUP DOESN’T ACT WITH ME!” is a quote I fundamentally disagree with.

What exactly is this mutual inscription made of? Does the inscription remain when we dislocate parts of a certain setting? Is the information once inscribed forever?

Section 1 Sound Piece Monologue

We enter a private space where we listen individually to a documented dialogue that is here replayed for you as a monologue.
The experiment focuses on questions like: Can we still distinct 2 voices when we listen to a single person? Do we sense the possible opposites? Is the monologued voice neutralised from its original dialogue context?

Section 2

A video recording of 33 minutes is here projected in three separate parts and slightly slowed down. Sound is removed. The camera is travelling in a circle staging 9 persons individually in a constant flow of one after the other. The staged persons are pointing at each other and they are being pointed at. Gestures, face and body expression, directing, looking and being looked at are in section 2 replayed in a new constellation.

Section 3 Interactive Performance

In this piece the audience will be lectured about the exact meaning of Rhetoric and Attention. This takes place around the table in the kitchen. Secondly the audience is confronted with a “discussion” at the same table in the kitchen. The participants of the discussion are random persons. They wear headphones. Their task is to mainly focus on reproducing sentences they hear through the headphones. They copy tone, timing and color. The sentences are one side of a documented interview namely the part of the interviewer. The random persons are sitting around the table facing each other. None of them were present at the original set up. Which information do they transit by hearing and reproducing?

Piece by Fanny Zaman in the context of a.pass Re-ject, E-ject 6th an 7th of May 2010, deSingel Antwerp

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Documentation and interesting links

tradition
Manuel De Landa
MATTER MATTERS
Chris Marker
Atlas Group

Song Mountain area, THE CENTRE DIRECTION 2009

Fanny Zaman

In March 2009 a project started at Song Mountain, a mountain range which lies on the southern bank of the Yellow River in China. It mainly revolved around martial arts and religion in the form of performance, choreography, group, landscape and setting. I was interested in a correlation between geography and choreography. The approach was like making an inventory bound by the time of one month aiming to reveal inspiring shapes and form stories of interest.

My aims and interests were to observe large scale pattern and choreography in the form of martial arts and industrial sites on a location that is concidered 'energetic'.

The landscape of Song-mountain is characteristic and pronounced. Apart from religion and martial arts, the naturally rich soil has also produced industry. This industry has significantly changed the lay out of the landscape. This makes the interaction between the surroundings and the industry visible and concrete. The interface between surroundings and industry has stipulated the patterns of and the figures in the lay out. This lay out or composition that evolves and transforms, sometimes gradual, sometimes radical, can be seen as a form of choreography. The industrial sites are set up and organised in the way that the division and structure of the soil has indicated it.

The 'Shaolin Temple' proves to be a powerful epicentre with a gathering effect.

I observe the organization and the set-up of the training spaces. What is the division like, the lay out, the surface, the colour? What attributes are present and how are they organized?

We observe the number of students and their division in the landscape, in the indoor settings , their clothes: color and pieces, weapons, flags and attributes, the pattern of the training, the recurrence, the sound of the training: voice, cries, songs, touching of music/fighting instruments, walls and floors, the sound of the environment, wind, industry, etc.

The set-up of the recording is repetitive because this set-up makes the figures and stories visible.

It is said that the number of martial arts students practising in Deng Feng should be around seventy-thousand.

It is said that this makes half of the entire population.

audio video piece - single screen - 37:17 by Fanny Zaman


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