View from the street / streetview

View from the street / streetview  

thanks to a site called Mapcrunch 

Twin vision

Click this link, and then the fullscreen button

to find these mysterious identical twins guarding an entrance (of sorts) to Ciudad Juarez.  

Zooming out, you can use the keyboard arrows to wander around what is apparently a very dangerous place. 

O.L.D. vs. N.E.A.U.

Below are two music videos which place footage of people from the 60’s dancing alongside newer music.
There’s something about what happens here which I find extremely touching. I’ve always fantasised about people from the past hearing music from the future… people at the Woodstock festival waking up one morning to a DJ set by, i don’t know, Autechre? But then, perhaps equally attractive is the idea of people dancing to new music, but in an older style – everyone still committed to a certain way of moving. But the genius here is the choice of period, where things are so palpably changing. In both the videos you can sense that dancing ‘on your own’ is still quite a new idea- there’s still a slight connection between boy and girl, and when someone breaks off it’s really so they can go crazy.
The first film I saw very late night on something like MTV around 15 years ago at my parents house, and spent ages afterwards trying to get my hands on the vinyl – it was pretty much the first time i’d heard minimal techno and was the start of a long affair (unfinished), but I always held this clip in my mind as one of the best music videos ever. When I found it on youtube I was really overjoyed. I love the fact that the Kooky Scientist himself, Fred Gianelli, writes in the comments ‘Hey, thanks for uploading this. I don’t even have a good copy of my own damn video or a working VHS machine’. I also adore the quality of the footage – very poor conversion to youtube from what must be one of the earliest examples of ‘video’ ever – it doesn’t look like film.
The second is a new track by Funki Porcini. I had no idea he was still making stuff, but by the looks of things he’s had a burst of creativity in the last few years. You can hear it all on his bandcamp page. The video is more accomplished than the other one, probably due to the Ninja Tune connection with the phenomenal AV team Hexstatic. The scene is actually taken from Luis Buñuel’s film Simon Del Desierto (1965).

http://www.beatport.com/search?query=kooky%20scientist&facets[]=fieldType:track

buy the track for a quid > http://funkiporcini.bandcamp.com/track/the-devil-drives

Rotozaza – [World (remembrance) Service]

A message we’re sending out to anyone who might have been in the Stoke Newington area of London this time, ten years back (June 2001)… 

Dear all, 

Exactly ten years ago Silvia Mercuriali and I presented, as Rotozaza, a large-scale, night-time event in the great Abney Park (abandonned) cemetery in Stoke Newington, London. It was called Rotozaza 6 [WORLD SERVICE]. Perhaps you either took part or witnessed it? There were about sixty artists and groups involved and, over the two nights, three thousand people came through the doors.

Over the years people have often mentioned it, and we’ve always enjoyed hearing the strange fragments of memories, variously distorted or inflected by time or the disorientation felt at the time – the vastness, the darkness, the often blurred line between what was or wasn’t ‘part of it’. 

As the project had at its core a concern with the process of forgetting (manifested in the cemetery’s slow handover to nature), we thought it would be interesting to put a call out for memories of the event, however faint or partial. Single lines or full page accumulations all welcome, as are spin-offs, associations, subsequent related happenings etc. If you happen to have photos or video, we’d be fascinated to see them, but for this we’ll be hoping for descriptions of what you remember.

Please email whatever you can to ant@rotozaza.co.uk 

Silvia and I will be meeting in Milan at the end of the month where we’ll take a look at what’s come in, and decide what to do with it. At the very least we hope to compile the writings in an interesting way. We may, in July, attempt a small reading of them in-situ, back in Abney Park Cemetery. As Rotozaza finished in 2009 we’ve been wanting to do something, however humble, to mark the end of ten amazing years working together, but so far have been too bound up with our independent and ongoing work to get anything together. This might be a good chance. 

Lastly, PLEASE forward this around (or share on fb) to anyone who you think might have been there. We’d hope this ends up doing the rounds, especially in the local (Hackney) area. 

Thanks in advance for taking a moment to see what comes to the surface. 

very best wishes

Ant Hampton, 

Silvia Mercuriali

Rotozaza 6 [WORLD SERVICE] was a commission from the Stoke Newington Festival 2001, curated by Fiona Fieber. 

www.rotozaza.co.uk

www.anthampton.com

www.silviamercuriali.com

Gallery of Past Rotozaza Frontpages 2

The ultimate Hackney portrait by Britt, a shoot with Henrique Neves Lopes for 5am in a broken glasshouse within the troublesome ‘collonial’ gardens in Belem (outside Lisbon), a still from 5am, a parking space in Buenos Aires, smashed toys in a corner of Rue des Cascades near where I lived in Paris, an upside-down empty shop space, and a passing car in Mexico City.

click on image, then use arrows > > 

Gallery of Past Rotozaza Frontpages 1

In order – a Citroen DS off the web, a still from Pierrot le Fou, the Burst project, a wall in a warehouse near Bridgwater, Somerset, where they make the amazing carnival floats (as documented beautifully by my bro, here), the Allentejo landscape where we made Punta Dois and, lastly, the edge of a skirt made by Silvia (out of used scripts of our show Doublethink).  

Click on the image, then use arrows >>

Mixtape, No Excuse for May

Some of the tracks, new and old, that are doing magic either side of my head this spring. (Walking around Warsaw the last two weeks I tend to put the entire Fridge back-catalogue on shuffle.) Fragments here and there from this wonderful film about the song-poem industry in the states. And others from Mos Def on this great link, flagged already a while back. 

Towards the end there are bits from great new albums by Isolée and Robag Wruhme. Full tracklist above (song / artist / album). 

Download > 116mb

The Quiet Volume – Berlin noch einmal > Warsaw

The Quiet Volume
Tim Etchells / Ant Hampton

*

The Quiet Volume is back soon in the astonishing Grimm Zentrum, Berlin – presented within the HAU programme. 

And shortly afterwards it premieres in Polish for Ciudades Paralelas, Warsaw.

… 

Berlin > 

May 12 – 16, 19 – 23 > Hebbel am Ufer, (Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum), Berlin, Germany

Warsaw > 

May 26 – June 3  > Ciudades Paralelas, Warsaw, Poland (Polish language premiere)

full info on The Quiet Volume here >  http://www.anthampton.com/tqv.html

– – – –

…the feeling of heightened awareness in which every sound is magnified, every movement has increased significance and all words dance with possibility (…) there is a sense that we are all privately running amok in the libraries of our minds. – Lyn Gardner, The Guardian. 

Foreground blurs into background, just as a camera shifts focus. This motion, forward and backwards like a the smooth jerks of a jellyfish, provides a vital sense of journey. From our position, seated and still, we are allowed to roam: a sendentary safari of a municipal space. 

The Quiet Volume feels to me both a treasure and a tool. It will leave you desperate to fall into a good book.  – Matt Trueman, Culture Wars. Full review here

The Quiet Volume in London, and other news

This is the mail I sent out to my contacts recently, some upcoming dates. If you’d like to get mails from me like this, let me know – subject line ‘yes please’ to info@anthampton.com

thanks

The Quiet Volume is coming soon to London, again to Berlin, then Warsaw and Zurich. It’s my latest work, created in collaboration with Tim Etchells (and commissioned by the travelling, site-specific festival Ciudades Paralelas together with Vooruit) – a whispered, site-specific autoteatro piece for two people in the silence of a library’s reading room. We’re really happy with how it’s been working so far and hope you can come along to it. In London, it will be playing in three libraries as part of the London Word Festival. 

Dates and links to further info below. Places are limited so if you can, please book asap  > 

April 8 – May 4 > The Quiet Volume > 3 London Libraries, London Word Festival, UK

Later, in May, TQV will also be returning to the amazing library in Berlin where it premiered, again within the HAU programme (Hebbel am Ufer), before moving a little further east to Warsaw, as part of the full Ciudades Paralelas festival. And then in June, the whole festival moves once more to Zurich. 

Full dates are here > http://www.anthampton.com/dates.html

Before any of that, however, I’m now in Ghent (Belgium) to present three shows at Vooruit: Etiquette (Rotozaza), The Bench (with Glen Neath) and The Quiet Volume. I’m also in residence there creating a new show with Dutch artist Gert-Jan Stam – a ‘script’-based autoteatro show for four people at a time, which we hope to present later in the year. I’m excited that it will be my first autoteatro piece not to use any pre-recorded audio or video. 

For anyone interested in this kind of work I’d recommend a trip to Vooruit. The wonderful Lundhall&Seitl will be there alongside many others as part of the festival ” The Game is Up! “ which starts on Tuesday.

March 16 – 26 > The Quiet Volume , The Bench (& Etiquette) > Vooruit, Festival: The Game Is Up!, Ghent, Belgium

I’d also highly recommend trying to engineer a way to see the whole Ciudades Paralelas festival. Curated by Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll) and Lola Arias, the eight different commissions were for site-specific performances which could happen ‘in any city’. The shows take place in generic places inherent to a city’s basic functioning (stations, shopping malls, courthouses, factories, hotels, libraries…). It opened in Berlin in September, before moving to Buenos Aires late November. Next stop Warsaw (May – including a new POLISH version of The Quiet Volume) and Zurich (June). Most of the works offer english versions. Full info here > Ciudades Paralelas 

Coproducers Fusebox (Austin, Texas) will present The Bench in April, and from May it will be playing for quite a while out of the Brewhouse, Taunton. Finally, Etiquette has some European appearances in Spain, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy – dates for Etiquette are here.

Clone attempts, 3 & 4

Buenos Aires-based photographer Irina Werning ‘remakes’ old photos with their subjects – same people and places, but older. The project is called Back to the Future. 

Korean artist Yeondoo Jung turns drawings by children into staged photographs in his project Wonderland. 

Clone attempt, 1

Clone attempt, 2