Exhibition view at "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2022

Every abyss is a poem yet unfinished (2022)

mixed-media installation/performance
(text, infrared heating light, electronics, audiovisual material)

Consisting of different performative enactments of text through voice and its transduction into infrared light, the work attempts to evoke corazonar (the warming up of reason) and operates as a research tool on the affective dimension of language. Each time the work is performed, a new archive of unfinished texts and audiovisual material, part of the artist's recent research, is displayed. During an activation performance, one or more of the texts are read by the artist into a device that transduces his voice into the intensity of an infrared light on stage. At the end of the reading, the light shines in repetition of the recorded sound intensities, performing the memory of a text after words are gone and affect lingers as heat.

In the first iteration, the artists departed from texts of his personal journal reflecting his experience of contradictory time during mourning. An archive of audiovisual recordings depicting the mundane passage of day into night is displaced asynchronously on the floor and juxtaposed with recordings of water flowing in contradictory directions. Reflecting the contradictory staging of time, a series of unfinished poems and auto-ethnographic essays have been placed on the floor. Reflected on their surfaces, an infrared light reveals the warm intensity of a poem after the activation performance has ended. Subsequent iterations have started from different points in time and constellations of texts and archival material. The work is open-ended, suggesting an auto-ethnographic form of research where concepts are born and found in the blurred boundaries between personally felt and culturally experienced phenomena.

Activation performance during the opening of "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2022

Preview (documentation) of activation performance at "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2022

Exhibition view at "Halbe Halbe", Dauerwelle. © Luiz Zanotello, 2022

Enactment during the lecture-performance "Becoming Tropical" at "Joint Research Day", Royal Conservatoire The Hague. © Alex Schröder, 2023

Enactment during a conference presentation at "Art of Research Conference", Dipoli Gallery, Aalto University. © Luiz Zanotello, 2023

Enactment during a conference presentation at "Art of Research Conference", Dipoli Gallery, Aalto University. © Myriam Gras, 2023

Acknowledgements: Project initially funded with the support of the Deutscher Künstlerbund in 2021. Exhibition "Halbe Halbe" produced with the support of the Binational Artistic PhD-Program at the HfK Bremen in 2022. Performance at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague supported by the PhDArts program in 2023. Installation and performance at the Art of Research Conference funded by the Leiden University Fund in 2023.