Text ~ Walking
Text~Walking, a performance for 16 participants and 16 books
Center for Artistic Research — Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 2013
Duration: 5 hours
This collaborative performance revolved around the reactivation of texts selected from Librioteca Pineal, currently housed at Center for Artistic Research in Bs. As. Argentina (http://www.ciacentro.org/node/1239). LP is a growing library commissioned by CIA to the artist in 2010. Originally it was composed of titles about aesthetics and theories of perception. Fifteen titles about epistemology and environmental ethics were added in 2013.
For this walk artists were invited to participate in a collaboration that entailed part chance, part agency, as we walked, read and interacted with the urban environment.
The participants chose titles from LP to do loud readings at first sight within the group, in the street. Some of the titles that were brought to the walk were Joyce’s Ulysses; Didi-Huberman’s What we see, what gazes back at us; Descartes’ Metaphysical Meditations; Iacoboni’s The Mirror Neurons; Kant’s Critique of Judgement; Greenberg’s Art and Culture; Givone’s History of Nothing; Ariés’ To die in the West; Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics; Blanchot’s and Levinas’ The impossible Friendship; Warburg’s The snake’s ritual; Ranciere’s The Ignorant Teacher; Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things.
After indoors attuning exercises the group headed to the streets, finding its way down 60 blocks towards the Rio de la Plata. Approximately every 10 minutes a participant stopped and read an excerpt selected by chance from their chosen book.