User:Aitantv/blog2023

06.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Grey overcast

I have returned from Georgia. Landing on my feet. I'm grasping for community and searching for it in the living rooms of millenial friends close by. The Netherlands is a cool grey steely geometric orderly rigid up-tight planned governed sort of place. I feel a sense of homesickness setting in as I look back on Georgia. A magentic pull from my body towards that geography, some sort of genetic map attempts to superimpose itself on that landscape; a negative layer looking for its postive, an etching finding its relief (wikipedia.etching).

I found a sense of home amongst the RB residents in Racha. This temporary community quickly formalized a schedule for domestic chores; a morning meditation and movement routine to create space for spontaneous creativity and emotional releases. Circling - the group act of attentive listening where we shared our immediate thoughts and feelings - was a tedious and challenging process. To sit with the concerns, grief, and complexities of others was a draining process. My body would be fully activated and ready to plough the day, but after circle it felt heavy, tired, and sore. These interpersonal emotions are weighty. The physical manifestation of heaviness equates with the gravity of the human experience.

I want to re-create (a slither) of this group field. My perception became a field of possibilities rather than channeled towards a specific point. Drawings became broad and almost fish-eye; film shots became mere crops of a wide omni-directional foley stereo soundscape; feasts were scattered with berries, salts, nuts, seeds, and oils, making a maximal taste mouthful of every bite. A de-centered approach to living, where the I was no longer so autonomous, produced a becomingness where process had a greater value than output.

I low-key mourn for my Georgian friends. Long-lost sisters, ex-wives, distant cousins, long-distance pen pals, a forgotten university colleague. They each occupied a position of familiarity from the very first encounter. I circle back to the body, and where the body finds its restplace. Is it climactic, cultural, social, cinematic, political, textural? Is it about colors, hairy, beauty, textiles? Is it to do with culinary tastes and satiating a void within with edible harmony? A sense of homeness in a foreign land. An uncanny belonging and being-with in the carriage of a Metro from Dezerter Bizaar to the micro-district of Gldani. Every grandma had a sparkle of Bibi with a soft comic gaze, a moth-scented wiry wool cardigan, badly-dyed hair, over-plucked eyebrows, and powdery doughy palms. Where do I go from here? Can I stay here in the cold steely grey grindhouse? Can I tolerate this clinical tepid womb?

07.08.23

Amsterdam, Home, Sunny with clouds

First day back to work, to the cycle, the hamster wheel, the assembly line batch production. My priority is to be productive with my time rather than remain dormant at a computer screen for the alloted labour time. I allocate myself phases of focused artistic labour/research to complete given tasks. I embrace morphological time; unlike chronological time according to the clock, this is a perception of time based on task. It's the how long is a piece of string mindset? "I'll meet you on the corner in the time it takes me to walk the breadth of the city". This changeability of time was an important feature of RB. Dinner preparation might take 4.5 hours. But every moment counted. & it may have felt like half the amount of time it took to get through a cicling session where we were encouraged to listen to one another's immediate thoughts and feelings. I'm still grasping for intimacy and community in my daily life. People are busy. Friends have prior arrangements. Society runs like clock-work, chronopolis. Time is measured by hours, minutes, seconds. Time is not relative. Time is measurable. I incorporate a more personal perception of time, that is relative and loose. 'Slow, slow, but steady' I focus on the task at hand.

The shot takes as long as it needs to elapse. The beginning and end of a gesture mark the moments of a cut. The static camera is a powerful tool to allow the audience to surrender to simple gestures and the pleasure of watching humans model. In 'Scoring the Long Shot' I hosted participants and gave them a brief introduction to slow cinema and Transcendental Style, two cinematic movements that fetishize the static frame. Together as performer-filmmakers we generated a broad soundscape that transcended a simple static frame of a projection screen located in the garden of Arteli Racha. A live foley soundscape was scored by the performer-filmmakers. The cinematic frame became a mere cropped referrent to this wide omni-directional stereo recording filled with rustling footsteps in the grass and performers tinkering with found metalic or plastic objects in the exterior. The output of this workshop was 'Making the Show' a one shot short film documenting the process, where performer-filmmakers were given the prompt: "the show is in 10 days and it's time to prepare the backstage for the audience". In self-referential social-realist style, the show was indeed 10 days away, and I considered the residency at Arteli Racha our private backstage.

But how was it recieved? 'Making the Show' was under the spotlight as we gathered in Kororti - a communal open studio space in Tblisi - for the event that we prepared as the public vinissage. I naively introduced the film as if it was a succinct narrative short worthy of the audience's full attention. Our visitors were forced to sit through eighteen minutes of ordinary people walking back and forth with a smattering of random actions and gestures. They were probably better off eating the aggressively delicious food prepared by the hostile chef with a mischievous moustache N.