Book and DVD release

price: 20 euro

contact and order: tropeeditionsatgmaildotcom

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

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

screened at FIDMarseille 2010

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.



meer

trope-platform

trope01: Sunday 25th of February 2007 (8 pm) Begijnenvest 53, 2000 Antwerpen
0101 Shifting Zones or God’s eye perspective, Fanny Zaman (B), Lecture 2007
0102 Mental Fashion, Inge Nederkoorn (NL), Performance 2007
0103 Here, Elizabeth Haines (UK), Audio-visual 2007

trope02: Sunday 22nd of April 2007 (8 pm)Begijnenvest 53, 2000 Antwerpen
0201 Zwarte gaten, parels en kiezen ( en snijtanden en ...), Kelly De Wilde (B), Lecture 2007
0202 Gitaar en Toon, Christophe Albertijn (B), Sound piece 2007
0203 Mag men de teksten van Antonin Artaud voordragen? Thomas Crombez (B), Lecture 2007

trope03: Sunday 23rd of September 2007 (8 pm)Begijnenvest 53, 2000 Antwerpen
0301 little big sculpture, Wouter Davidts (B), Lezing 2007
0302 Séance een model, Fanny Zaman (B), Test01 2007
0303 Campanella, Inge Nederkoorn (NL), Video 2005
bonus As Far As I’m Concerned, Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Interieur 2007

trope04: Sunday 24th of February 2008 (8 pm) Begijnenvest 53, 2000 Antwerpen
0401 Rocks and Minerals, Pedro Teodosio (P), Lecture 2008
0402 De Avatar, zijn wereld en zijn vrienden, Herman Verhagen (NL), Lecture 2008
0403 Hell/Dunkel, Ivan Willemijns (B) Blockprint on silkpaper 2008

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Paradigm, 2003

-The limit is x going to a. -














The paradigm is a model of variation.
X is consideration, negotiation and transformation. The identity  is a.
The limit is x going to a, the identity (a) only exist in terms of interpretation (x). The paradigm embodies the whole.
The constant flow between these two is a very interesting domain. Edith Doove calls it “The grey mass of strategy” referring to the chess play of Duchamp.

The paradigm is context; it is a situation that is not an element by itself but a group of elements in position towards each other but also towards other groups and other elements. The elements should be posed towards an identity. This identity however is not fixed or isolated either; it’s a new network of stressed points.
To study context: how, when, where and what is off an endless complexity.
Henri Bergson explained that deconstruction wouldn’t help to reach a. He was right but deconstruction isn’t a tool to reach a, it is a tool to reach a higher level in the game; the game called paradigm.

Deleuze’s stressing to differentiate has been of great importance, instead of syntheses, to accomplish a synthesiser. But what is the identity and what is his differentiation? The identity is more fixed and the differentiation is less fixed, this seems to be the only plausible definition because they are both influenced by context. The identity embodies the differentiation and vice versa they can’t be separated as two elements. Depending on the context an element is identity or differentiation. They can only be separated in terms of their context.

If differentiation can’t be an enduring product, how to be a synthesiser?
By subjective choice!
Or as how Lyotard puts it, to understand the social relations, at any level, there is not only a theory of communication but also a game theory: to know these game theories you should know how to act, when to act, depending on who you are and where you are.
The issue is that in our new globalised world of total accessibility it still comes down to the impossibility of transmitting a situation.

How to transmit a situation?
The differentiation of a subjective identity is constructed.
Creating a situation, the location of an occasion, the drafts of the identity at best.

By leaving out the identity you loose as well its differentiation which is obvious. Still I see many attempts to create differentiation by itself.
“Bridge the Gap” by Akiko Miyake and Hans Ulrich Obrist is a very good example for this. The observation that “the most important things in conferences usually happen in the ‘in between’ – between different disciplines and geographies, but also in the ‘in between’ of the actual conference programme.” cit. janus is interesting. But in their conference “Bridge the Gap” they did exactly this, leaving out the identity (the conference) thinking they could have the in between by itself. By attending similar attempts I observed myself as well as other audience and I noticed a strange awareness. It was an implosion what it caused. There was no synthesiser going on or crossing points, nothing as how Deleuze had meant it with his theory of the rhizome. It was movement by itself, which is as good as standing still. It was exhausting diffusion but my friend calls it cynicism.

Fanny Zaman

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