Cine (Taken with Cinemagram)
Cine (Taken with Cinemagram)
Cine (Taken with Cinemagram)
Cine (Taken with Cinemagram)
Cine (Taken with Cinemagram)
There is always a problem when Void Simulacrum begins. As I am anchoring one side and stretching the spandex band and my partner is on the other side doing the same. The setting is always different and the people who are going to participate (IF they even decide to participate) are also different. The setting and people have a profound impact on the overall shapes and movements of the piece and the questions which arise are: How do you begin? How do you organize? What is the aim?
Any time a group of people get together there is some social structure which intuitively emerges. Some one comes out as the “leader” and sometimes there is no leader. When there seems to be a plateau and a group is stuck in one shape and an equilibrium is reached between the fabric and the participants, someone comes out (no matter what the reason is) and abrupts the reached resting point. New shapes and forms are then invented. This, for me, has a political element.
I was born in Bulgaria and I am used to the idea of a protest demanding for a better situation beyond the current one. The cause may be low wages, high electricity bills or cutting down trees in protected areas. Sometimes when people suffer through economic and political crises and if they feel rage, they might be afraid to revolt against their current structure. It takes local organizers who have a vision beyond the current situation to find the causes of the outrage and to organize an event demanding a better now. This event is the protest. The idea of the individual as a leader of a protest is a double edged sword, because there is more than one individual protest leader. There are even times when a protest has a lot of supporters gathered in one place, but a leader with the same beliefs from a different area decides to take a group from his area to protest somewhere else. This causes the collective to split, thus diluting the protest. So, in Void Simulacrum, the political emerges when some one becomes the leader and creates certain perimeters of operation and the others follow. This remains, until someone leaves the spandex band, which generally causes everyone else to realize the absurd nature of the exercise and decide to leave as well. So the similarity between Void Simulacrum (I.e. void event) and a political event (I.e. protest) is the collective gathering and diluting. The difference is that in Void Simulacrum the aim is the collective creating new forms and, in a protest, there is a demand for a better situation.
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@tiredoftheroof (at York University - Keele Campus)
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