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2015 » New Zealand » Performing Space
| Curator: | Simon Twose |
| Authors of Theme: | Simon Twose, Katrina Simon |
| Designer / Architect of exhibition: | Simon Twose Katrina Simon |
| Institution: | VUW + UNSW |
NZPQ'15 Prostor: Rezonující město
1. Film: Resonant City: Elusive Paths
The potential of the New Zealand landscape to drama-tically rupture and shake is subtly infused into NZ architecture; our buildings and cities are actors in an ominous, potential performance.
A short film will explore the notion of a radically altered city, drawing on the transformations brought about by the Christchurch city earthquakes of 2011. It will explore transient conditions in the city in an evocative visual medium, enabling the viewer to encounter a shifting, performative architectural condition, where Landscape, Architecture and the Body are in a complex relationship. The intention is for seismicity to become a spatial material in its own right, with a fluid potentiality. This will be structured by a traverse through the city that reveals shifts in materiality; encountering concrete, dust and the adventitious plants that colonise abandoned sites.
This is not a vivid disaster movie, but an elegiac, abstracted meditation on occupation, inhabitation and the beauty of collective movement. Multiple material and vegetative conditions speak of underlying ground conditions; plants spring up where former water courses across the land were previously concealed by urban development, buildings tilt and fragment over liquefied, previously secure, earth; dramatic accelerations of the ground transform buildings to clouds of dust.
The film is a traverse through constellations of material from Christchurch city. Miniature pieces of landscape: stone, dust, liquefied sand – and architecture: concrete, steel and dust – float within the temporality of the visual narrative. These point to moments of change and resonance in a performance of architecture, landscape and humans.
A city tour will lead participants in a traverse of Prague’s fluvial potential. Tour-goers will become part of an active drawing of flood dynamics that is both revealed and newly created by their collective movement through its spaces. They will experience an alternative dimension of the city through walking and by collectively gesturing at critical moments through the walk, in ways that relate to or evoke the transformations of the city through the dramatic and resisted influx of water. Participants will themselves encounter the city as a form of flood, and line of least resistance, and their collective and individual movements will be recorded as an evocation of this dynamic event.
2. Prague City tour: Resonant City: The Line Of Least And Greatest Resistance
Film: This will be a 20 minute short film followed by a chaired 35 minute panel discussion on the themes raised in the film. The panel discussion is open and will be chaired by the authors and two invited guests. The panel will discuss the intentions behind the film, as they relate to exploring the city by focusing on some of its more extreme and unsettling dynamics, rather than a conventional focus on fixed objects and spaces. Prague City Tour: The tour will draw unseen dynamics of the city using the trajectories of tour walkers. All members of the tour must agree to be photographed/videoed for the duration of the tour and for these photographs and videos to become part of a subsequent performance/installation in New Zealand. The curator will provide release forms to be signed by tour participants. The walking tour will start at Glam Gallas Palace, and move through the city north-east toward the Stefanik Bridge. The tour will venture out to the middle of the bridge before returning to the south-eastern river bank. The tour will then move along the river banks back towards Charles Bridge onto which the tour will advance again to the center of the bridge, and the river. The participants will then return to the palace, where the tour will officially end. The total distance will be approximately 4km which can be achieved comfortably in 1 hour.