‘Heads will roll’ is the executioner’s grisly promise. The executioner’s house in Venice portrays a disembodied head – a catalyst for an image of a head rolling across the ground. But a rolling head still has some momentum. And a body with a head can also roll. Rolling is a form of travel that confuses bipedal authority. Bipedalism is led by the eyes and anyone who has been to Venice knows how tricky it is to find the gap in the crowd – keep your eyes peeled and gaps in the crowd reveal themselves in a vertical plane not a horizontal one. To roll across ground is to move without the certainty of vision and relies instead on the sensory announcements of the skin. The activity is mollusc-like in its pace, sensitivity and vulnerability – a snail trail of human proportions. Traversing stone paths and steps while horizontal is an intricate negotiation, with each measure of the roll alive with sensory information. Body weight releasing into gravity is the most efficient way; muscles relax when possible and allow momentum to do its work; joints articulate in sequence, softening as they release into the weight of the body. For me, rolling is a surprisingly satisfying means of movement – not efficient, but physically satisfying because of the call to fully attend to something embodied, each new moment as considered as the last. It is the opposite of the changeable, scattered impulses forced on you by the tyranny of the crowd in Venice.

The pedestrian crowds of Venice are clustered into tourist bedlam; a bipedal meltdown of interrupted intentions, changes of direction, contact with other bodies, sudden stops, frustrations, pauses for viewing (that interrupt someone behind you). To see someone rolling across this contested ground is either an irritation or a comedy. How could someone be so ridiculously, yet privately, attuned; so carefully attentive to the environmental changes yet prone amongst the tourist traffic? In rolling, embodiment is given primacy but its quietness screams at you. Tourists stare, locals look away with a weary sufferance or smile with mild amusement (selfie culture gone mad?). It was rolling, as a form of movement, that seemed so at odds with the chaos of congestion.

Each site (Palazzo Bembo, the house of the executioner on Calle de la Testa, the Church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli) had its own qualities and its own challenges. The banker (a bank, along with the gallery, is also in residence at Palazzo Bembo) was appalled that I could be rolling across its marble floor when customers might enter. ‘Don’t do this’ he asserts; but are the merchant class still calling the shots in Venice? Yet the cold marble was smooth and consistent – the perfect medium for rolling. The muted shaft of light spilling into the foyer of Palazzo Bembo was a theatrical setting. At the far end of the foyer and beyond the doorway to the street a group of tourists are caught in the sharp light of midday, a visible counterpoint to the mystery of the rolling figure.

couldn’t upload audio here so have done on another blog… See this link, it also has the didactic description posted in the room on the day:

Arbitrary Distinction: Performance, Palazzo Bembo, Venezia 2019

arte in corso

1. Rolling

2. Falling

3. Claiming/clinging/clutching

Dario and I had our first day trying to make something. We walked to Calle De La Testa (close to Pallazo Bembo) and checked out the street. It’s a local neighbourhood…not tourist territory. In the small plaza in front of the head on the wall, we filmed some material – my head turning along the bottom line of the camera frame across the length of the plaza, while the executioner’s head is framed above. Difficult to explain, but it looks uncanny. That there is a relationship between my moving head and the executioner’s head is clear. What that relationship is, though, is strange and uncertain.

This came out of just arriving and looking at things through the camera, taking some shots and looking at the possibilities. We thought this might make a good score in response to the 3 sites we have to work in. That is: explore and frame the site through the camera to begin; use the photos/videos to suggest further ways of physically or materially engaging (and which can be framed by the camera) that are responsive to the site, the conceptual provocation and the shots you took.

It’s very simple, very open. But it allowed us to be responsive and spontaneous. No doubt, other scores will emerge also.

Shaun

“Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The executioner’s blade/the editor’s cut

Film as thin coating of something (a skin) – a film of dust or dried up silt after the water is gone.

The meaning of ‘film’ “to make a movie of” is from 1899 – what happened in Venice (a death? And execution?) that corresponds?
no prizes for paintings were awarded at the Venice Biennale in 1899 <a href="http://<https://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/history/1890s&gt;
erroneous claim that in the 1899 Biennale Venice Gustave “Klimt presented the famous Giuditta II” yet this work was not painted until 1901. <a href="http://<https://www.venetoinside.com/events-in-veneto/great-events/venice-art-biennale/&gt;

A conspiracy?
Pelicula which means ‘film’ in Spanish, if re-edited, projects Le culpia “I blame him”, but also gives us “Pail Clue” (a reference to the spilled water).

The stereoscope – ‘stereo-scopic’ lit. “solid sight”.
The stereoscopic device in the provocation (from Cameron today via email).

1838 – Wheatstone proposed that the device “be called a Stereoscope, to indicate its property of representing solid figures.”
Charles Wheatstone, ‘Contributions to the Physiology of Vision — Part the First. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision’ 1838

1842 – The Stereoscope was also described as “an instrument for detecting a calculus in the bladder, and foreign bodies in the soft parts.”
Robley Dunglison, Medical lexicon: A dictionary of medical science, 1842

It is only possible to see in three dimensions because our visual field is doubled and split between two views. When the two views are not compatible (e.g. they show two different scences), we can call this ‘duoscopic’.

Raymond Roussel
Roussel seems to have explored a form of duoscopy, where he explains that his last published work New Impressions of Africa “was to have contained a descriptive section”:

It concerned a charm, a miniature pair of opera glasses whose two lenses [Stanhopes],
each two millimeters in diameter and meant to be held up to the eye, contained
photographs on glass depicting the Cairo bazaars on one lens and the bank of the Nile
at Luxor on the other. (Foucault, 1987:124)

Roussel’s opera glasses are impossibly small and therefore quite useless. No doubt this was
his point.

Possible strategy if all else fails:
The shard we have been allocated at Bembo, a wedge with a door as one wall, opens up the possibility of two scopes (views of Venice) placed at eye level. The viewer would need to nestle their face into the corner to see the stereoscopic images, with their back to the executioner.

The city requires sacrifice.

—

“She says it’s like a city in aspic . . . left over from a dinner party, and all the guests are dead and gone. It frightens her. Too many shadows.”
Heather, the blind psychic

Blind psychic from Don’t Look Now, seen on bus home from Venice today