“The book, here and now, with its author and reader, either uttered or silent, is a performance. Bookperformance is a naked, fixed and textual body. If movement is impossible for a fixed body, to turn the impossible into the possible, it is necessary to attempt the weird and the absurd. In order to successfully attempt the weird and the absurd, you must possess not only a considerable intelligence but also an extraordinary courage for realizing and accepting the significant power of the weird and the absurd. To be able to do all these it is necessary to be a good reader”. Bookperformance Manifesto, principle 1/7
Event: Body & Sound of I & Eye: Bookperformance.
Context: Venice International Performance Arts Week
Venue: C32 Forte Marghera, Venice.
Date: 23th May 2015
Duration: 8 hours + 30 minutes.
Languages: Turkish, Italian, English.
Text: Pieces from MyFace Book, Çiğdem y Mirol
Text Transparency into English: Çiğdem y Mirol & Özge Wambach, translator & Thomas Alkins, translator
Curated by: Çiğdem y Mirol.
Created by: Çiğdem y Mirol, and the inspired audience / readers.
Video by: Johannes Deimling
Photograhps by: Monika Deimling
Outcome: Performance was included in the collective digital exhibition curated by PAS.
Body & Sound of I & Eye(U): Bookperformance events showcase how a book (as an object) becomes a book in its physicality. Readers / Audience are welcome to join the performance, which is a very nature of Bookperformance that is based on co-creation. Each Bookperformance event is unique in its nature, thus most of the happening is unexpected both for Çiğdem y Mirol and the others.
This specific Bookperformance was focused the compositional material of the books. From trees to the resonance that a writer hears in the sounds of papers; from the call of the reader to the struggles of receiving and responding that call with “right” words and giving the “desired” meanings to those words on a page.
The construction of the pages on the floor was a long durational perfromance of 8 hours, involving crusing coal and salt stones into powders, and created thr material such as words on the round boards, boards themselves, and the mask. Upon this praparetion the Bookperfromance itself took 30 minutes.
Please visit instagram for detailed audio-visual documentation: @bookperformance
Below are some images.