'Exposition' in progress.
The Italic I is an artistic research collaboration between writer-artist Emma Cocker and interdisciplinary artist Clare Thornton that explores the different states of potential activated by purposefully surrendering to the event of a repeated fall. Rather than an accidental occurrence encountered by chance, within our artistic investigation falling is apprehended consciously as a training exercise for mind and muscle, tested out in physical, cognitive, and even linguistic terms. Within The Italic I the act of falling is slowed and extended through the use of both lens and language, as a means for attending to its discrete phases or scenes. Within The Italic I, the live performance of falling is not shared with an audience: this enquiry explores specificity of experience communicable in the mediation of performance through its documents, both photographic and textual. Rather than view these technologies as somehow deficient or limiting— as incapable of reflecting the experiential, ephemeral nature of the live event — The Italic I reflects on the document itself as an ephemeral artwork, always evolving, always in transition. Less as an indexical record of ‘being there’, the performance document is approached as a malleable material that can be dislocated from its originary historical context, to be brought into new configurations through repeated staging and re-staging. The exposition presents a series of configurations and iterations of the documents generated through The Italic I within which we have explored three interwoven questions: How to present the experiential nature of falling as a force rather than simply representing its form? How to develop a mode of linguistic expression — an alternative poetic textual document — that embodies rather than describes the live experience that it seeks to articulate? What alternative modalities of performance and performativity — what emergent temporalities and subjectivities — arise through the restaging or reactivation of different performance documents? By reflecting on the evolution and performativity of the various ‘documents’ generated within The Italic I, our intent is to explore what is at stake at the threshold where live and lens meet, in the interval between live performance and lens-based mediation, between event and document.
