Public Poetic Minutes

Abstract

"Thinking is searching for the voice in the speech." (Agamben)

How are stories created and how can these stories be fixed in the moment of their creation?  Which form could this performative act of representing the here and now have?
How can the quality of orality be captured in a readable, visual form?
How does the act of speaking or discourse and the system of language function as an instrument, to not accept the world as it is?

This is an artistic project researching the sign-systems within the spacial interactions of the voice.

Voice, in this context, may be experienced as a present and acting body shifting in space, just as it is present in our minds, as the act of thinking, or in other words, as an auditory process within our cognitive perception. I am researching the audio-visual forms of oral speech and the fleetingness and un-accessibility of voice in space.

My working practice is based on a documentary approach and on a filmic thinking. Audio- and videotapes are recorded, people are interviewed, texts read and topics researched in an intensive act of collecting, in order to form the basis for my deliberation. This often serves as the focus of my investigations into questioning the relationship between the author and the subject. Finding the conditions of recollection and neglect alongside the visible and the non-visible in historical contexts as well as in the every day. This leads to the discovery of different forms of narration.

Approaching the field of "knowledge production", I am staging conversations in order to make a narration visible in the moment of its creation. I want to capture these conversations like a copy typist writing minutes, as a sensory perception in a public space. It is a form of contextualised narration, which informs the audience, the reader or spectator about the background of the reception and the communication.

Framing something with my camera, the edges are as important as the focal point. But what do I omit?  What is outside of the frame, not to be seen? Intriguingly in this context, the voice may be part of the image, even when not seen, which leads back to the position of the spectator.

How do I spend my time?
Work and labour in the field of art.

Within a period of five years, I have realised a series of ongoing site specific works, utilising different contexts in Austria, India, the Czech Republic and the USA. The central premise for these works involves the "arts and crafts" and the role of work and labour within this field.

About four hundred handwritten notations map the working process of that time, similar to audio-visual records. Without following a defined script, this extensive convolute of drawings shows a chronology of an associative process and how I find my forms and ideas. The notations may be read as "random footnotes" to my entire working process.

"Forgetting: non-presence, non-absence. To forget a word is to encounter the possibility that all speech could be forgotten." (Blanchot)

In this context, it is not only about what is remembered, but also a question of who remembers, under what circumstances and in which form this memory is articulated.

The results of this project will be, an audio work, a visual mind mapping and an essay, provided in a book. I will make this available by working through the notations, the narrative interviews and the researched material, each in its own specific manner.

Bio

Ricarda Denzer explores processes of transformation, translation and resolution in the specific context of social, political and artistic spaces and the impact of that on recent times. In her films, audiopieces, drawings, photographs, and installations she is using a filmic thinking and performative aspects, to reflect different forms of narration. Language, particularly the spoken word and sound are central to her work. Denzer's artistic works have been shown, for example in exhibitions in Kunstraum Bernsteiner, Vienna 2011, at the NGBK in Berlin 2011, at the Lentos Art Museum, Linz, at the Open Space, Vienna 2009 or at the Site Santa Fe Biennale, in New Mexico, 2009. She is based in Vienna.