Surface Tension
2019
with Emma Fält
What is a dialogue? Can we have one that is real and successful between a human being and nature?
The work began with Fält's attempts to open up a physical dialogue with Barents sea coast at Varanger fjord, especially with its inanimate parts like sand, rocks and water. For a month she continued walking the same shoreline, the middle of Vadsø town, in northern Norway. These acts were transformed into drawn, written and recorded material for Fält and Fusco to continue working on with.
ph: Emma Fält
ph: Emma Fält
ph: Emma Fält
Listening to a non-verbal conversation is about intuitively interpreting someone else’s actions through our own body. Understanding implies figuring out the intention of the talker; communication needs transformation from both sides. We went through computational and intuitive approaches to interpreting the collected images and sound, applying digital processes that analytically extract what matters in an image as well as analogue, tactile and materic transformations of images, understood and reinterpreted through the act of drawing.
As a result of multilayered conversations approaching the theme of dialogues between humans, human and nature, material and immaterial, verbal and non-verbal, the exhibition gathers together what has been found when we let our thoughts and work-in-progress open for the other person to respond to it. We reflected upon both the quantifiable and hard-to-grasp features of a conversation. For our research, we built up a laboratory of some kind to investigate the possibilities of multimodal dialogue, experimenting with physical properties, chemistry and alchemy.
What happens when and if we somehow manage to travel through the surface layer, and find what's hidden in the depths of the other?
Fält-Fusco collaboration started two years ago through conversations between ink-based and digital drawing, where they concentrate through improvisation and scores on each others action, gesture and energy in the trace. Beyond the different approaches and media they individually employ, Fält and Fusco are developing a common language grounded in the materiality of the dialogue between sonic and visual expression, the energy that the tangible trace embodies and the emotional quality of the movement that creates it.
6.-23.6.2019
at Gallery Ars Libera, Kuopio.
With the support of Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).