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An(n)e and the GR2013 – detour(netent) placement scheme

The GR2013 was inaugurated in March: a newly established National semi-urban walking trail, at over 365 kilometres, looping in a rough figure of eight that turns on the axis of the Gare TGV  Aix-en-Provence. The route goes around the Etang de Berre and then traverses the Etoile Mountains with the central part of the walk dissecting Marseille from North to South along the port and through the eastern fringe of the sprawling city as it climbs into the mountains.

From April through to July DecentreDerSpace  placed over 110 word-objects along this trail. Word-Objects have been borrowed, given and exchanged with over 50 artists.

This project is part of De/tours, a year long exploration of Marseille Provence as European Capital of Culture 2013.

Inside Out Blues (Sur L’Envers Blues)

Anne Robinson as part of DeCentreDerSpace Residency in Marseille, May 2013
Song-film/Performance by Anne Robinson

Song-film:

The Inside Out Blues makes a sound thread for a film. The voice is on the inside coming out  Surrealist poet/writer/artist/thinker Artaud’s last work To Have Done With the Judgement of God, written for radio in France in 1947, worked with the extremes of unsettling ‘mad’ noises, shouts, cries and glossolalia. Artaud particularly wanted workers, people working with their hands and bodies, perhaps those most imprisoned in the body, to hear his work. Scheduled to air early in 1948, it was pulled from the broadcasting schedule at the last minute. The night before it had been due to air, a programme was broadcast on French radio advocating engagement with American popular culture as an antidote to Nazi occupation, intentional hegemonic repression, still visible in the gross gentrifying of Marseilles as ‘capital of capital’.

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Pavilion Small Object ‘a’

Pavilion Small Object ‘a’ exists as a mobile base for cultural exchange, creation and dialogue: ‘But let my life’s inflated words inflate themselves through living in the b-a-b-a of composition’ (Artaud: 20).

‘A’ space and place appearing, disappearing and reappearing in an intoxication of free artistic expression, where the body soars, or falls the spirit, dreaming: “the nightmare is the introduction of unreason by way of the void, is the anarchy in the inherent and normal logic of the brain, is the poison put into its well-being, is an intervention from top to bottom…” (Artaud: 108 from Shit to the Spirit)

The Pavilion has received 100 word/phrases from artists/individuals including:

Zoi Arvaniti, Hayley Newman, Gabriel Pagonis, James Eastaway, Will Brook, Jane Watt, Eypraksia Kontsa, Marijana Rimanic, Peter Fraser, Anne Robinson, Ron Henocq, Steven Ounanian & Joanne Wardrop, Bioni Samp, Andrew Pulver, Catharine Tsarouha, Marilli Mastrantoni, Cecilia Wee, Art Audada, Adrian Heathfield, Ana Laura Lopez de la Torrre, Ingrid Barton, John Jordan, Paula Varjack, Charlie Fox, Tim Jeeves, Paul Ruat, Daniel Lehan, Mikey Georgeson, Katharine Merlan, Anne-Catherine Le Deunff, Andrew Cooper, Simon Bayly, Saul Baraitser, Charlotte Young; and borrowings from Tommy Simpson, Jacques Lacan, Walter Benjamin, Flanagan & Allen, Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh, Tadeusz Kantor, Johannes Baader, Helene Cixous and Henri Bosco.

Pavilion ‘a’ is becoming a conglomeration of phrases, speaking: ‘A phrase which Baudelaire coins for the unconsciousness of time peculiar to someone intoxicated by hashish can be applied in the definition of a revolutionary historical consciousness. He speaks of a night in which he was absorbed by the effects of hashish: “Long though it seemed…, yet it also seemed to have lasted only a few seconds, or even to have had no place in eternity.” ‘ (Benjamin from Arcades Project: n15,1)

Pavilion Small Object a – brief but potent – this time, this place, the space ‘a’.

Culture/Art De Centre Der Espace

counterproductions proposes DeCentreDer as a miniaturized experimental cultural centre. The centre exists as an artist project space, both as production studio and as experimental site, for encounters with another public: including a residency/exchange programme, artistic research platform/s, performances and public forum.

DeCentreDer Pavilion (small object) ‘a’

A temporary peripatetic structure for transparent dissemination of Cultural Centre activities and potential. Pavilion ‘a’ acts as a first port of visit, an opening frame and exhibition/performance space.

Artist Resident from April 2013:

counterproductions  invited 6 artists/artist groups to contribute and share the space of Culture/Art DeCentreDer  Space – in an Other Capital of(f) Culture, Marseille 2013. Artists from Switzerland, France, United Kingdom, Japan, Lithuania, Armenia/USA, Slovenia bring to the project an critical international approach to the idea of European Capital of Culture. Other artists and groups will be invited to take part in the programme scheduled for MP 2013. For more information on mini-residency artists visit here

DeCentreDer Espace – counterproductions’ research:

Taking the themes of Marseille European Capital of Culture as provocations, to rethink cultural and artistic production for this nearly new Century, the research practice, residency programme and artistic discourse will reuse buried, hidden and undervalued cultural currency.  Working particularly to (under) and (re)mine material and ideas from the last Century: the European invasions of Walter Benjamin’s experiments, Antonin Artaud’s latent visions and Tadeusz Kantor’s poor objects, combined with other Sub terrain/Med terrain and sub marine operations. It will offer parallel reinterpretations of ‘radical practice’ from an outside, implanted, and wholly foreign perspective.

“In addition to these cultural high points, a profusion of smaller miniaturized events also take place across the region.  Their aim: to make all forms of cultural and artistic expression accessible to the widest possible audience by  inventing new ways of showcasing the region [and] in  working closely with local populations.” (extracted from Marseille Provence 2013 Culture has found its Capital)