‘In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates.’ -Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar 1983

Nine visual artists, poets and musicians have been invited to present their interpretations of an excerpted text, from “Reading a Wave” from Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. During the course of the evening a series of events respond and reflect on the text in artworks and performances that range from the gestural and theatrical to musical, sound and image installations.

“Reading a Wave” focuses on the titular Mr. Palomar standing on the seashore observing the pattern of the waves. The text stresses the difficulty of identifying each individual wave: ‘Isolating each wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier to separate that one wave from the preceding wave, which seems to drag it towards the shore.’

A flow of performances which overlap in parts, reflect Mr. Palomar’s task. While some responses take the literal pattern of the waves as their inspiration, and use repetitive sequences to create new patterns, others focus on the analogies drawn and address the complexities of interpersonal communication and the limits of language. Whilst there may be infinite differences in how we may read a text, diverging from this point of reading, there may also be an infinite number of possibilities for different readings to come together, make conceptual or literal connections, converging.

The night is thus engaged in a hermeneutical task, where one text is continually transformed and retransmitted. The performances are situated in a mise-en-abyme of interpretation and knowledge; in trying to explore the difficulty in making distinctions between the individual phenomena from the phenomenon of which its part, this exhibition simultaneously and actively takes part in such acts, in order to better understand them.

Time: 18th January 2010 at 18.00-20.30

Location: University of the Arts London, Wimbledon College of Art
Merton Hall Road, London SW19 3QA
Map

List of practitioners
Alice Brooke-Smith
Josie Reich
Madge
Natalie Mcllroy
Rhiannon Armstrong
Stephen Mooney and Will Rowe
Taneesha Ahmed
Lizzy Whirrity

Press contact: curate@criticalism.org