ATP DIARY

Ashes Withyman Moore | Live Arts Week VI

English text below In occasione della VI edizione di Live Art Week, che è in corso a Bologna fino a domani, sabato 29 aprile 2017, ATPdiary ha deciso di fare degli approfondimenti su degli artisti che vi performeranno. Live Arts Week è un programma tutto dedicato alla performance presentato dall’organizzazione culturale bolognese Xing. Quest’anno verranno attivati gli […]

Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini
Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini

English text below

In occasione della VI edizione di Live Art Week, che è in corso a Bologna fino a domani, sabato 29 aprile 2017, ATPdiary ha deciso di fare degli approfondimenti su degli artisti che vi performeranno. Live Arts Week è un programma tutto dedicato alla performance presentato dall’organizzazione culturale bolognese Xing. Quest’anno verranno attivati gli spazi della Ex GAM di Bologna, che nel 1977 ospitò la Settimana Internazionale della Performance.

Segue un’intervista a Ashes Withyman Moore che domani, sabato 29 aprile (h 19.30) presenta Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid (environment, produzione Xing/Live Arts Week) all’Ex GAM di Bologna

“Scape, pedicellus, flagellum,
scape, pedicellus, flagellum

Johnstone’s organ Honeybee cell phone, set to airplane mode
Great hairy hands of the sky clapping out this language:
Slugs – lie down, be drowned in beer, cut in half with these rose scissors
Pigeons – your feathers make foul house slippers
Vermin – I’m shaking the blood coagulating seed rattle
Mosquitos, Fleas, Bedbugs – I’m fashioning world teeth to snip you clean severed
Dirty street Cats – antifreeze milk bowl and a fan belt trap, I watched you being dragged to the dump by a bit of string”

In Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid, Ashes Withyman Moore ha piantato delle antenne. La funzione comunicativa di questi oggetti non produrrà necessariamente risultati apprezzabili; come nell’attesa che il cosmo ci restituisca i segnali di civiltà extra-terrestri, il tempo qui allude all’incontro possibile tra uomo e animale. Mandala per insetti e trappole affettive, questi pali amplificano un sistema di proiezioni mentali, creando un campo di fraintendimento, tra nutrimento e nocività. Una stazione di ascolto piazzata sul fondo del barile per succhiare le origini del mondo?

Ashes Withyman Moore, fino alla settimana scorsa conosciuto come Gareth Moore, è nato a Matsqui, nella British Columbia e vive e lavora a Vancouver. Moore sfida sistematicamente il rapporto tra l’accidentale e l’estetica. Per la creazione delle sue sculture – effimere e complesse – ha un approccio processuale e localizzato, prediligendo l’impiego di materiali di scarto e non ortodossi. Portando in superficie ciò che non è immediatamente visibile, Moore osserva con sguardo sovversivo le abitudini quotidiane ed il sempre mutevole ambiente che ci circonda, come in Blocked Arch, Deferred Ceremony, Dawn Chorus, Tra-diddle da. Like a fly in slow suspense (2014). Le sue ricerche esplorano attualmente le proprietà fisiche e simboliche del suono in relazione agli esseri umani, gli animali e la scultura, come nel caso di A Burning Bag as a Smoke-Grey Lotus (2015), una cerimonia quotidiana composta da sculture strumentali, o come per Bullae (2017), serie di live sonori. Il lavoro di Moore è stato presentato in Canada e su scala internazionale con mostre personali a La loge di Bruxelles, Glasgow International, CCA Wattis Institute, Witte de With Rotterdam, e dOCUMENTA (13) Kassel.

Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini
Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini

Interview with Ashes Withyman Moore (CAN)
Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid
(environment, première, production Xing/Live Arts Week)
Saturday 29 april – start 7.30pm> Ex GAM

“Scape, pedicellus, flagellum,
scape, pedicellus, flagellum

Johnstone’s organ Honeybee cell phone, set to airplane mode
Great hairy hands of the sky clapping out this language:

Slugs – lie down, be drowned in beer, cut in half with these rose scissors
Pigeons – your feathers make foul house slippers
Vermin – I’m shaking the blood coagulating seed rattle
Mosquitos, Fleas, Bedbugs – I’m fashioning world teeth to snip you clean severed
Dirty street Cats – antifreeze milk bowl and a fan belt trap, I watched you being dragged to the dump by a bit of string”

In Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid, Ashes Withyman Moore has planted antennae. The communicative function of these objects will not necessarily produce significant results; like the agonising wait for the cosmos to give us signs of alien life, this waiting-time alludes to the possible encounters between man and animal. Like an insect mandala or an affective trap, these masts amplify a system of mental projection, creating a field of inquiry between notions of nourishment and harm. A listening station deep at the bottom of the barrel to draw out the origins of the world?

ATP: Where does the project “Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid” originate from? Why did you decide to plant some antennae inside the garden of the ex-GAM? Were you inspired by the location? 

Ashes Withyman Moore: The first part of the title comes from the painting by Renoir, “Woman in a Garden” (Woman with a Seagull) 1868, which depicts  a woman sitting in a garden with a seagull hat…
The work as a whole is set up as a kind of composition relating to the public feeding schedule at Tiergarten Schönbrunn, Vienna. The worlds oldest zoo, running since 1752. One part of my mind was on John Berger’s writing about the history and fracturing of our earlier engagements (based on economic and productive exchange) with animals and how this has been all but fractured.
People now feed birds with bread in parks and one can buy diapers in a supermarket for dogs.
The courtyard where I have installed the work feels like a miniature tableaux of the world outside itself, it’s something of a garden, a park and a zoo.

ATP: You often use discarded materials, which seem part of your site-specific methodology. What does it mean for you?

AWM: Yes, I have often used found material. Typically this has been connected to a certain process built into the project that it was connected to. Here I’ve used a variety of materials: domestic paint, hand milled cedar, precious metals and a variety of food including curry leaves, peanut butter and stomach antacid.

ATP: Why did you change your name into “Ashes Withyman Moore”? Can you satisfy our curiosity?

AWM: … “it seems to me that every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity of a name that survives whoever carries that name. Whoever receives a name feels mortal or dying precisely because the name seeks to save him, to call him and thus assure his survival. Being called, hearing oneself being named, receiving a name for the first time involves something like the knowledge of being mortal and even the feeling that one is dying. Already dead by virtue of being promised to death: dying. (How could one, I ask in passing, thus refuse the animal access to the experience of death as such by depriving it of nomination?)”…From: The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow) by Jacque Derrida

Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini
Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini
Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini
Ashes Withyman Moore, Lady with Gull, Peanut butter steps, World Antacid environment, produzione Xing:Live Arts Week ex GAM Bologna, 2017 ph. Luca Ghedini
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