Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu: Interbeing: A proposal to meet

‘Aeroponic’ – root systems nourished by air – Acts is the name given to the nomadic Dutch Art Institute’s final & festive iteration of the two year long so-called Kitchen* trajectory. Aeroponic Acts are conversations-in-a-form. Each presenter addresses one question as a practice of engagement.

Here you will find the documentation of Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım, followed  by a written report, authored by Harun Morrison, which includes a summary of the spoken comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Lisette Lagnado and Momtaza Mehri. 

Interbeing: A proposal to meet

Ilgın's question: What is the shape of a gap?

Ilgın's introduction: We are inter-beings, always half-way there, half-way far away. The seeming separations are sometimes nostalgia, sometimes melancholia, sometimes joyous flights between different corners of places, beings, seasons... Filling the gap of separation is a continuous challenge of learning or assimilating, consciously or unconsciously, altering or adapting, culturally or instinctually

To understand this gap more, speech, sound, line and movement will form a compass, at the centre of the room, holding different aspects of the space, translating the dynamics in the present continuous, interdependently. They form a microcosm in the middle of the room’ and they move, sound, ripple and yield to the energetic space, encountering each other, and everything that surrounds them.

Performers: Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu,  Alexandra Duvekot, Laura ten Zeldam and Marilú Námoda

Harun's report: Alex stage left on double base, plucking the strings. Ilgin sits in Sukhasana pose with a microphone in front of her. Fragments of speech are heard - although she speaks aloud it conveys interiority: “  . . . finally, a centrifuge hurled me over here.. the crust is topsy turvy – stone is naked, water, warns with silent sirens keeping her surge and rage inside, after reading too many surfaces one day I had a dream, the crust was getting cracked like an eggshell . . . some things remain penetrable, like bottoms of young trees, old stone houses”. Ilgin recites as though hypnotised, drawing words from another space and time. Above those on the stage is a screen connected by phone camera, relaying Laura drawing on a sheet of paper on the ground. Slowness permeates the space and emanates from the performers. Marilú moves across the space as Ilgin speaks, slowly sliding on their back, the music feels directionless, the drawings resists taking us in a singular direction. Ilgin begins to sing in gibberish seemingly shifting from song to improvised vocal exercises. The mouth becomes a gap, perhaps the gap of the question, a shape from which shifting sounds emerge, so a corollary to Ilgin’s question might be what is the sound of a gap? or is a sound a shape? The ending was indistinct because it never quite began nor ever quite finished.  

Barby Asante: I’m thinking about the set up, its performativity, how it re-asserts the audience receiving a work, what was improvisation and how much space was given to different elements of practice? How much was rehearsed, structured, work? I was struck by the poetry that weaved between the dialogue between performers – struck by the phrase, HOW DISTANCE WORKS.  Silence, power going into the gap, the noises, the intimacies we see and experience as we enter gaps, gaps that are within ourselves, gaps that are in our thinking, gaps we want to feel but cannot feel, gaps open to invitation and exploration, and each element was exploration of the form of the gap and different manifestations of that.

Momtaza Mehri

1st Provocation: Can adaptation be a collective action?

There is a ripple of interconnectivity, like a current, between you all. I see it in the arc of a sweeping hand, the twang of instruments,  the slide across the page, and the movements attuned to the words. 

2nd Provocation: Can nostalgia be a cage?

Does it weaken or strengthen our ability to relate to each other?

There is a drifting sense of nostalgia throughout your presentation. Its mournful quality unites speech, music, movement and rhythm. 

3rd Provocation: What is gained through relinquishing a part of ourselves or our subjectivities? 

When two of the people on stage fell silent and when one was positioned at the centre of the stage, I thought of inbetweenness and inter-being.   

Lisette Lagnado: Resonations from the previous performance overlapped with this for me, the condition of being an interbeing is also temporal, for me the question of this presentation is ‘What brings you together?’ I felt that more than the possibility of looking at or for a gap, I could feel continuity all the time – and an independence all the time, the gap for me was not presented, I was expecting something related to a crack or a rupture; perhaps the search for a gap is manifest by different needs of expression: drawing, singing and movement. My question becomes, were you looking for a gap? Do you want to shape a gap?

 

Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu's "Interbeing: A proposal to meet" was presented before live audience at the Posttheater in Arnhem on August 26th.

Find the overview of all 24 AEROPONIC ACTS 2021 here: UNDERSTORY CHANT