PER/FORMATIVE CITIES

A Nest of Triptychal Performances

Saun Santipreecha

Curated by Camilla Boemio

Presented by Reisig and Taylor Contemporary [with objet A.D]

“We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we try to reach some final meaning, which words cannot achieve.”

— (Mr. Palomar)

The Reader scans the room and encounters an object—A—in itself a subject in the system of objects, visual and aural, that encompasses the Reader. This subject voices the disembodied sounds displaced through distortions and refractions, embodying a system of cities and myth, walking, playing, transforming perception into the perceived via abstractions…

This exhibition engages with three novels by Italo Calvino—If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, Invisible Cities, and Mr. Palomar—as well as the three cities which have paved my own journey to this exhibition: Bangkok, Los Angeles, Rome. The installation interweaves the visual and the aural, the ephemeral and the physical, employing a triptychal, scalable configuration, folding and unfolding each layer, from the cities’ sonic imprints, to the performative, relationally-modular video installation to the three copper sound sculptures. The sounds themselves are created from the performative gestures of social contributors from all three cities, as well as flautist Cari Ann Souter and myself. These are further modulated by the subjective system of the public spect-actor’s movements in the gallery—resisting, yet subsumed within, the fixed system of the video projection’s embedding of mythos. Like the formative and performative actions that make a city, always an entwining of three elements—nature/environs, human/systemic action, and myth/ideology—within time, the work weaves the macro into the micro level. Bordering on either side of abstraction which twist and entwine within each other, from the subjective to the objective back to the subjective and outwards again, these actions do not end with me as the artist but both come from beyond and continue further, from and through systems that form not only the morphology of who we are but that of the cities we live in: embodiments of the disembodied, “spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.” (Invisible Cities)