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Channel: transdisciplinary – Gwenn-Aël Lynn

Performance nutritive disseminée en trois points

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Performance nutritive disséminée en trois points
 

 

Cette performance se produisit lors du colloque-disloque ” L’art et le politique interloqués ” organisée par l’APPA, ligne de recherche à la Sorbonne. Trois performers entraient en conversation avec les passants autour de l’histoire coloniale des aliments qu’ils offraient gratuitement: chai (thé Indien), maïs grillée et cacahuètes. L’allusion à l’histoire et à l’économie coloniale était une manière détournée de questionner le statut économique de ce que nous appelons “l’art.”

Un article à propos de cette performance fût publié dans l’ouvrage collectif “ACTES”, chez l’Harmattan, en 2005, dont en voici un extrait:
“L’histoire coloniale des trois aliments discutés précédemment détermine le choix qui fut fait pour ce colloque/disloque. C’est pourquoi du chai (thé indien au lait et à la cardamome), des épis de maïs grillé et des cacahuètes furent offerts aux passants dans la rue et permirent un échange oral autour de leur histoire et leur symbolisme. Leur décalage, par rapport à leur origine, dans la mémoire des européens, symbolise la globalisation actuelle, préfiguré par le colonialisme : ” la découverte de l’Amérique suscita l’unification épidémiologique de la planète, provoquant un choc microbien et viral chez les Amérindiens ” [Encyclopedia Universalis.] L’unité économique de la planète, l’universalisation (souvent de force) des valeurs européennes (sens de la propriété terrienne, valeur du travail, etc.), l’agrandissement du territoire connu, par le biais des grandes découvertes, qui n’étaient des découvertes que pour les européens, car pour les peuples qui subiront le colonialisme ça n’étaient que le début des problèmes, tous ces faits historiques amorcent la globalisation, bien avant que l’expression ne soit crée. (…) Puisqu’il y a un marché de l’art, qu’il y a de la spéculation autour des oeuvres d’art, que les collectionneurs peuvent déduire de leurs impôts les sommes qu’ils investissent dans le travail de certains artistes, il est tout à fait ” artistique ” de montrer l’économie dont est issue l’art (l’art historique) et l’économie à laquelle participe l’art contemporain.”


Urban Communal Mint Garden

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Urban Communal Mint Garden

 

 

Urban guerrilla garden.

Untitled (2008)

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Untitled (2008)

 

For this installation I chose smells about the locality of Chicago based on interviews I conducted with long term Chicago residents. I interfaced the smells with some of these interviews abstract (to give some context to the scents) with an EZIO board. The visitors’ movements were tracked by small c-mos cameras looking down at the area around each smell diffuser. Depending on where the visitor was he would trigger the smell diffuser and one of the two or three sound tracks associated to each diffusers. In other words, by moving around the diffuser he/she would go through two or three short sound tracks.  These tracks were composed by Paul Schutte, based on olfactory interviews I had with long term (15 years or more) Chicago residents. The scents were supplied by Michel Roudnitska from Art-et-Parfum. This was coded in processing (processing.org). The diffusers were disseminated over the entire gallery floor, trespassing curatorial boundaries, challenging territorial ownership, pretty much the way scents and sound behave. This constituted my MFA exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

For a collateral version of this work into NetArt, go here and click on “Scensing Histories”

Tea is the Needle

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Tea is the Needle
 

 

This performance took place at the Nida Art Colony, in Lithuania during the T-R-A-C-E-S symposium: reinventing interdisciplinarity. I devised a tea ritual based on five herbs that grow on the Curonian Spit: Thymus serpyllum, Fragaria vesca, Hypericum perforatum, Rosa canina, Achillea millefolia. The goal of this performance was to articulate movements and sounds with moods related to the scent of each tea. Sonification was provided by Natalia Borissova. It became an interactive live tuning of tea, scent, sound and movement. an article in Lithuanian was published by Laima Kreivyté: « Nidos heterotopijos. Ir laivas plaukia

Audiolfactory Creolization

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Audiolfactory Creolization

Exhibition view: Arrowhead Room at the Waubonsee Comunity College, Sugar Grove, Il. Built with Processing and Pure Data. Photo courtesy Sarah Baransky

Note: the wooden sculpture on a pedestal is not part of this installation.

Audiolfactory Creolization” is an interactive installation which combines sounds with smells to reveal the complexity of creolized identities in Chicago. I started this project in 2009 by engaging in conversations with community members who shared a “mixed” experience: mixed race, mixed culture, transgender, bilingual or trilingual, and especially people who, through personal experience, have come up with their own definition of hybridity. I asked them to relate their experience to scents. These constitute the olfactory component of this work. The scents are: Pressurized Air, Tibetan Incense, Pine Tree, Tree of Heaven, Fresh Cut Grass, Soil, Chinese Incense and Moth Balls, Chai, Rum, Tar, Leather. In addition, I collaborated with sound artists to create audio files that would supplement the scents, and would thus assist the visitor in recognizing and understanding the fragrances. The sonic structure of each audio file also attempts at expressing “creolization.” Thus sounds and smells converge to propose a fragmentary experience of creolization in Chicago. There are five audio tracks associated to each scents, so there is a total of 55 audio tracks (11 X 5). Each time a visitor activates one of the scent diffusers, one of these five tracks is randomly chosen by Pure Data from its pool of five. Hence it ensures a rich and diverse aural experience, while managing the flow of information, should the visitor decide to linger.

“This project is partially supported by a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.”

For further discussion of these ideas, please see my interview on the blog of Bad At Sports: http://badatsports.com/2011/accents-on-the-hyphen-gwenn-ael-lynn-on-hyrbidity/

Collaborators:
scents: Christophe Laudamiel and Michel Roudnitska; sounds: Christophe Gilmore AKA FluiD, Rebecca Pavlatos, Travis; sound engineering (Pure Data): Benjamin F. Carney.

Interviewees: Adrienne Dawes, Kelsang Drago, Amanda Gutierrez, Tanzin Jemyang, K-Joe, Shalaka Kulkarni, Diego Leclery, Luis Nasser, Evan Plummer, J. Frank Santana, Hui-Min Tsen, Dion Walton.
Olfactory workshop participants: Sebastian Alvarez, Evan Plummer, Samantha Hill.
Participants in nose and ear casting: Sebastian Alvarez, James Britt Jr., César Condé, Samantha Hill, Nadia Hotait, Paul Hopkin, Bryant Koger, James Earl Lynn, Shirin Mozaffari, Evan Plummer, Patrick “Q” Quilao, J. Frank Santana, Eric Winfield.

Click on the picture to view a video of the installation

A downloadable catalog of the exhibition at Waubonsee Community College can be accessed here

Performance / Installation

Fire Is Form

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Fire Is Form

Performance for the Rites And Terra-Bytes Interformat Symposium at the Nida Art Colony where I was a resident in June 2018.

performance photos courtesy Andrej Vasilenko

A performance in 5 smells, with back drop video. It took place on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania. It asked: who gets to claim indigeneity, who is given a voice or not, who holds power and feel oppressed? Hence the opening scent, “pine tree”, established the local olfactoryscape (a pine forest); cleansing the audience with sage, referred to Native American spiritual traditions; birch tar, aimed at bridging the Curonian Spit (formerly a subsistence fishing economy where tar was used to water proof fishing boats) with indigenous contemporary struggles in the Americas (Standing Rock); dill (that I wore) indicated another local smell, extensively used in Lithuanian cooking; and “camp fire” was the time to raise questions about how “indigeneity” had been framed by the symposium curators. Camp Fire is also a universal smell, as every society on earth has sat around a fire. The backdrop video was there to contextualize the sage scent as well as the birch tar. The footage of an anti-Trump protest in Denver during the 2016 presidential campaign, shows an Indigenous woman, practicing her traditional spirituality, being arrested by police for doing so. It implied the following question: how come I get to cleanse (burn sage) without anyone interfering, while indigenous people, who invented smudging, cannot ?

the Architecture of Struggle

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The Architecture of Struggle

From July 13th to October 31st 2022

With the collaboration of Christophe Laudamiel for the scent design.

The Architecture Of Struggle is a city wide installation that operates as a tribute to environmental activism in Chicago. Chicago has a long legacy of environmental struggles, from the shutting down of the Fisk and Crawford coal plants in Pilsen and Little Village to the Ban Pet Coke coalition on the South East side of the city. I began this project in 2016 by engaging with environmental activists from the communities. Activist interviews contextualize the scents they associate with their environmental experience. It is indeed our sense of smell that warns us of potential air pollution. The installation consists in audiolfactory [sound and smell] modules located in proximity to sites of environmental struggle. The modules are in the form of gramophone horns. I elected this form because it compels the visitor to look inside. In addition, it echoes the form of bullhorns favored by activists. Through its doubling as both an antiquated sound device (gramophone) and a voice amplifier (bullhorn) it signifies sound, the activists’ voice. Some visitors have also suggested that it looks like flowers, which I am perfectly happy with. In order to experience the entire installation, visitors travel through different neighborhoods and industrial corridors, thus casting a different light on the city of Chicago. It is the sum of these modules with their space that form the entire city-wide installation, thus testifying to the very important work that activists selflessly do on behalf of the living, by protecting our air and water.

This work is dedicated to the memory of James Earl Lynn (September 26 1933 – February 3 2022)

and to Mike N. Durschmid (November 6, 1960 – June 2, 2018).

“This project is partially supported by a Cultural Outreach Program grant (2017) from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.”

Here is an interactive map displaying locations, and hours (click on the gramophones to read the information):






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