SPEAKING TOGETHER — MANO/RAMO CO-PRESENTS AT THE IMAGES FESTIVAL

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Fri­day April 18 @ 5  PM
Admis­sion: $10 general/$5 mem­bers, stu­dents, seniors
Jack­man Hall — 317 Dun­das Street West, McCaul Street entrance

Speak­ing Together
 http://www.imagesfestival.com/calendar.php?event_id=1272&month=n

The obtuse and absurd sys­tem of hand signs and move­ments that make up the actions in Open Out­cry rep­re­sent a lan­guage reduced to the con­cerns of finance and econ­omy, a closed sys­tem, yet one that is per­va­sive in all facets of our lives. From here, this pro­gram push­es out­ward, to explore the notion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through both­lin­guis­tic and non-lin­guis­tic means.

Open Out­cry
Ben Thorp Brown
USA, 2013, video, 15 MIN
A per­for­mance that cat­a­logues and inves­ti­gates the com­plexly absurd means of ges­tures that were once the pri­mary mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tion by com­modi­ties traders on the stock trad­ing floor. The per­form­ers cre­ate a kind of instruc­tional video – one call­ing out the words and describ­ing the asso­ci­ated actions while the oth­er demon­strates those actions – high­light­ing the self con­sum­ing nature of this lan­guage that was both invent­ed by and made obso­lete by finance capitalism.

Wow and Flutter
Jen­nifer Brady
Ire­land, 2013, video, 13 MIN
A por­trait of a mag­nif­i­cent bird draws on the 30-year rela­tion­ship between ani­mal cog­ni­tion sci­en­tist, Irene Pep­per­berg and the African Grey Par­rot who she trained in ele­ments of human lan­guage. The ele­gant depic­tion of the ani­mal attempts to ‘give voice’ to the crea­ture while rais­ing ques­tions about what cre­ates and what lim­its language.

one, two, many
Manon de Boer
Bel­gium, 2012, 16mm/video, 22 MIN
one, two, many strings togeth­er three per­for­mance ges­tures: a con­tin­u­ous, sev­en minute long flute per­for­mance, a record­ing of an off screen dis­cus­sion about the qual­i­ties of Roland Barthes’ voice, and a choir of four singers per­form­ing to a small group of peo­ple. Each seg­ment of the film artic­u­lates a dif­fer­ent posi­tion about and man­i­fes­ta­tion of the voice. Mov­ing from the closed, cir­cu­lar breath­ing of the flautist, Michael Schmid, in the first sec­tion, to the cho­rus per­form­ing for the audi­ence, de Boer’s film presents a med­i­ta­tion on speak­ing togeth­er, lis­ten­ing, and the indi­vid­ual body in rela­tion to the collective.

Peo­ple to be Resembling
The Otolith Group
UK, 2012, video, 21 MIN
Peo­ple to be Resem­bling was com­mis­sioned for the exhi­bi­tion ECM–A Cul­tural Archae­ol­ogy, a research-based archive project about the his­tory of the pio­neer­ing music label ECM. The video focus­es on the musi­cal trio Codona, a group found­ed by Collin Wal­cott, Don Cher­ry and Nana Vas­con­ce­los in 1978. The video uses his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs, inter­views, archival footage of the musi­cians and a text cita­tion from Gertrude Stein’s “The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans” to reflect on the junc­ture of two dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions of polit­i­cal form in the his­tory of black music.