A CHOREOGRAPHED COINCIDENCE
GRIMMUSEUM, KREUZBERG
MARCH 19 - APRIL 17, 2011
Marco Bruzzone, Constant Dullaart, Kinga Kielczynska, Darri Lorenzen, Benja Sachau, Timur Si-Qin, Ignacio Uriarte, Jorinde Voigt
"They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game." – taken from R.D. Laing knots (1979)
“Was it a b-b-bar or a b-b-bat I saw?” I was nervous. Originally the script wasn’t meant to be a script. It was supposed to fall off the top of my head spontaneously like free association gleaned for parenthetical references. But with the camera rolling, the words that came out were cooked and wrought and I was watching myself say it as I was saying it. “Was it ‘recurse’ or ‘recourse’?” I thought. “Choose one,” they whispered. The nature of the game and its rules created a forced coincidence, a crapshoot of circumstance and yet the itching doubt as to whether this setting is rehearsal.
Abort, Fail, Retry? A game of chess has two equal sides. The movements that determine the outcome are easy to trace and repeat but the precision and the nature of the sequence, when repeated, becomes a performance. By analyzing the minutiae of everyday rhythm it is also possible to map out the actions people unconsciously engage in like moves on a chessboard. The resulting map is a document of coincidence that also allows the possibility, through an inevitable failure, to repeat it. This map could be an algorithm for what becomes the ‘choreographed coincidence’. Herein lies a world where spontaneity, causality and improvisation are based on varying degrees of posture, synchronicity and calculation all seen within a symphony of premeditated events. “It plays like a song,” they insisted.
Shadowboxing. With the help of a strong narrative he could remember himself in their memories. Betwixt. He knew that to create a mise en abyme it required two mirrors. The contents from the nth reflected mirror were a strange distillate. It offered all the qualities to simulate the source reduced to a rippling of fractal imagery. The final barrier was the glass. “Cocteau used mercury!” he exclaimed. “That’s right!” the whispers gasped.
Different bottle same wine. Two exhibitions with the same content distort each other’s reflection in a rare moment of syntropy. A broken Rorschach. A stuttering palindrome. Within the symmetry neither is the original nor the source but, rather, rehearsals. Choose one.
