Wilfred's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lectures marathon, at State of Concept in Athens, June 2018 was entitled

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Summary

Wilfred’s presentation begins with a sound-recording of his role as Lobster in the film ‘A Piece of Dada’, produced with the IICD study group in the last year. The recording is played from a Dictaphone placed next to and enhanced by a megaphone; both are lying on a box structure outside in the galleries back yard. Clad in a gorgeous silk slip dress, Wilfred scurries into the frame to forward the recording (it is unclear whether the first fragment was intentional) and we hear lively folkloric instrumental music, the sound grainy as if from a recording of an old recording and at times distorted. Then we hear Wilfred’s voice again, telling us that he has just finished a yet unfinished text and that he is “not there at the moment”. He continues to emphatically read the unfinished text, a text about “speaking English” in specific and language in general. Wilfred wants the audience to hear his voice, his accent, and his language which is “in captivity” while socializing in English. English, we hear, is accent, privilege, domination, supremacy, survival, simulation, colonialism, and control. One does not only need to learn it, but learn to “speak it proper”, the right way. The text continues to lyrically explore what it means to learn a new language and to be between languages. According to Wilfred, the frequent use of certain words in the widespread language of English, has allowed them to grow and gain “disproportionate strength”. Privilege is introduced as an example of such a word. Rather than run from it, Wilfred invites the listeners to figure out how to use and give shape to it.

He stresses once more that he is “not there”, but in the past, and introduces the implementation of proxies to bring the text to it “spoken use”, manifested through sound and movement. It is up to the listeners to “collect and collate” and make their own meaning. Listing the technologies and objects used in the presentation – a megaphone, stylophone, Dictaphone and iPhone – Wilfred’s voice announces himself on the recording and promptly the present Wilfred nimbly hops onto the box and fiddles with the equipment, exchanging batteries to record a sound and then sonically alter it, using it as a base to what seems to be a spontaneous rhythmic, staccato-esque composition with the stylophone. Once the track continues on its own, Wilfred begins moving to the sound on the box. After a while, two fellow students bring a ladder and place it so that he is sat between the ladder’s legs, before climbing up the ladder and getting up on a ledge. Wilfred has taken a second, slightly smaller megaphone as well as a pair of glasses and, once equipped and positioned, he starts reading a text in Romanian from index cards, which he drops onto the audience after finishing. Throughout, the hectic electronic audio continues and when the reading is over, Wilfred plays a short, loud siren sound before dramatically tossing the megaphone onto the ground and descending down the ladder.

Responses

Sven Lüttiken

Sven Lüttiken starts by reading the English side of a bilingual card that was distributed or thrown by Wilfred: “Nr. 39: what I want to say is that the language in which I speak Nr. 41: and that which I compose are not the same.” He was intrigued by Wilfred’s use of the verb composing, indicating that language can have musical qualities next to being denotative and discursive. He brings up other presentations in which the spoken word has taken a confessional or phantasmatic, oneiric mode. He was struck by the monologue about language, particularly English and its various connotations, especially coming from the megaphone, which he calls an instrument of authority, a prosthetic device of power.

Sven Lüttiken also reflects on the performative elements at play, including the “showering” of the audience with words, and the issues that the presentation seems to revolve around: language, authority, sovereignty, and power. These themes and their treatment address not only English as the language of global power but also the different modalities that exist in all languages – e.g. poetic and prophetic registers as well as phenomena like speaking in tongues, “a prophetic breakdown of language” which he feels Wilfred might be playing with as well. He stresses that most striking was the use of the megaphone as an instrument for a public articulation of power, public in a spatially defined sense, a “locational medium” which Wilfred seems to use as a distanciation device. He mentions ostranenie, a concept by the Russian formalists, describing a writerly technique of “making strange”. For him the presentation created an engaging and at times uncomfortable relationship between Wilfred – shifting between various registers of intelligibility – and the “captive audience”. Especially productive was the constant oscillation between somebody who appropriates certain regalia, modes of speech and “performance from below”, and the somewhat unsettling potential that is inherent to these formal and performative dimensions of authority.

Maria Lind

Maria Lind launches into a heartfelt compliment of Wilfred’s outfit and nail polish – especially the careful composed mixing of colors. She connects the way in which he  dealt with language and the set-up in terms of what can be grasped, to Wilfred’s question “Can you piece it all together?” – her answer to this is that she cannot. This leads her to reflect on the notion of opacity, which the performance engages with in her opinion. She refers to Edward Glissant’s dictum of “the right to opacity” which was developed with regards to colonial subjects in relation to colonizers – the right not to be describable as a form of resistance. She liked how Wilfred used the existing conditions and most likely “made the neighbors raise some eyebrows” and how he wanted to transgress physical boundaries by climbing somewhat unsafely, this element of risk made her uncomfortable. The ending she experienced as a bit of an “Eastern European cliché” of performance art, citing the dramatic tossing of the megaphone onto the floor. Closing her response, she “finds it impossible not to reference Mladen Stilinović”, particularly his work “An artist who does not speak English is not a real artist.”

Hypatia Vourloumis

At the beginning of her response, Hypatia Vourloumis lists several shared research interest of Wilfred and her: the question of musicality, poetics, dissonance, discrepant engagement and its relationship to experimental writing in Nathaniel Mackey sense. She points out the paradox of Wilfred’s very eloquent articulation of his resistance to articulation. Connecting to Maria Lind’s comment on the riskiness of the performance, she cites Joan Retallack’s notion of the “poethical wager as an ethical risk”, which Wilfred took to the limit. The megaphone she sees as an instrument of protest, it’s a way to amplify a political presence within a demonstration, but in Athens it is also used to distribute sound through the city, e.g. by people wanting to offer services. The emphasis on sound she associates with paralanguage, and the beatboxing – used as a transition out of the manifesto against English and fed into a feedback-loop – opens up language to its materiality.

Her question to Wilfred is how this “opening up language” is then a tension that is something that must be confronted when it comes to producing a coherent thesis. There is something powerful happening in the presentation which can be developed, she says, but this tension will remain, a refusal of sense-making by embracing sound and unintelligibility – the difference between what communicability and communication is the tension of the writing. Also mentioned are “the breath in relation to the mix”, the tension between opacity and the desire of dialogue and the question of translation – in Gayatri Spivak’s sense a practice of submission as well as dialogue. An open question about the choice of attire in relation to what Wilfred is trying to (not) communicate is posed before she concludes her response by expressing that she feels “this is the beginning of something very rich”.