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Cerith Wyn Evans & Florian Hecker – No night No day
June 4–6, 2009 | Teatro Goldoni, Venice

Still: No night No day, 2009

Performances

Florian Hecker

Commissions & Productions

What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of a screen intervenes. (Gilles Deleuze)

No night No day is conceived as an abstract opera taking place at the Teatro Goldoni in Venice for three nights only. This work by Cerith Wyn Evans and Florian Hecker, commissioned by TBA21 for the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, departs in apparent opposition to the audio-visual marriage from the very notion of the recombination of both sonic and projected image. Such polymorphic structure heads off from the central perspective of the stage and constantly shifts across the entire space of the theater, over the duration of forty minutes.

Yet, in the tradition of performative productions, Wyn Evans and Hecker work on visualizing, proposing, testing and expanding the medium’s possible present and past image(s), revisiting some of the radical innovations, which happened in music, dance, art and acoustics in the past fifty years. Though accepting the space’s inherent parameters, they propose to examine and experiment with the diversely coded visual and auditory layers of performative and spatial expressions, offered through the used referential materials. From Japanese Bunraku and Noh theatre, passing through the films of Peter Gidal (No Night No Day, 1997), Kenneth Anger (Rabbit’s Moon, 1950) and Guy Debord (Hurlements en faveur de Sade, 1950); the structural sonic conceptions within Iannis Xenakis’ S.709 as well as Herbert Brün’s Dust, Jens Blauert's The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization and the auditory Gestalt phenomena as described by Albert Bregman. Integral to the work is the simultaneous and constant revelation of certain production mechanics such as of the stage, the performance and the performer-audience relationships. It is this very screen where the major principles or rules of perceptual organization of the interweaving structural elements apply to both, vision and hearing.

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commissioned by

Thyssen-Bornemizsa Art Contemporary for the 53rd International Art Exhibition / La Biennale di Venezia

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds, curated by Daniel Birnbaum
Duration of the Biennale: June 7–November 22, 2009

dates

June 4–6, 2009

LOCATION

Teatro Goldoni, Venice

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