Lecture
Thursday, 15. 9. 2022, at 19:00
Right atrium in the City Hall
Registration required: info@cona.si
Duration: 1 h

Photo: Matej TOMAŽIN, CONA archive.

Walking from Scores is a collection of around 100 non-site-specific scores by artists, composers, and collectives involving walking, listening, and sound-making in urban space. The project explores the relationship between the aesthetic and the everyday spheres, the dynamics of sound and listening in urban space, and the (porous) boundaries between artist and audience. It deals with specific sites and contexts, drawing from two premises:

(1) an interest in walking, conceived as a relational practice, as a way to establish a reciprocal interaction with places, as a way to “read and rewrite” urban space; (2) a focus on verbal notation and text scores, conceived as catalyzers of action and as open invitations addressed to everyone.

The title is a variation on Working from Scores, a text originally published in 1990 where Ken Friedman discussed his notion of “musicality” in visual art and intermedia, interrogating ideas of “authenticity,” “intention,” and “meaning” and understanding the artwork as a set of instructions that allows a constellation of different interpretations. Following such an approach, the project is based on the reproduction and redistribution of the collection and its reactivation in specific forms according to each context. After many iterations in different cities in the form of pop-up exhibitions, flyering, workshops, anonymous interventions, and collective performances, the project is becoming a book (Les presses du réel, 2022) to keep sharing and disseminating the collection.

This talk will focus on the project’s theoretical framework and its hybrid forms while questioning some issues that emerged over the years, such as the supposed neutrality of the walking body and the places they walk through.

With scores and instructions by: Peter Ablinger, Milan Adamčiak, G. Douglas Barrett, Elena Biserna, Blank Noise, George Brecht, Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Chase, Giuseppe Chiari, Seth Cluett, Philip Corner, Viv Corringham, Bill Dietz, Amy Dignam, David Dunn, Haytham El-Wardany, Esther Ferrer, Simone Forti, Francesco Gagliardi, Jérôme Giller, Oliver Ginger, Anna and Lawrence Halprin, David Helbich, Dick Higgins, Christopher Hobbs, Jérôme Joy, katrinem, Debbie Kent, Bengt af Klintberg, James Klopfleisch, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Jiří Kovanda, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Bob Lens, Ligia Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Walter Marchetti, Larry Miller, iLAND/Jennifer Monson, Max Neuhaus, Alisa Oleva, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Open City (Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday and Simone Kenyon) & Emma Cocker, Nam June Paik, Michael Parsons, Ben Patterson, Mathias Poisson, Anna Raimondo, Pheobe riley Law, Jez riley French, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Mark So, Standards, Nicolas Tardy, Davide Tidoni, Ultra-red, Isolde Venrooy, Carole Weber, Manfred Werder, Franziska Windisch, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young.

Elena Biserna (FR) is an independent scholar and occasional curator based in Marseille, France. She writes, talks, facilitates workshops or collective projects, curates, and sometimes performs. Her interests focus on listening and on contextual, time-based art practices related to urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes, the public and political sphere.

She contributed to several international publications (Les Presses du Réel, Mimesis, Le Mot et le Reste, Errant Bodies, Amsterdam University Press, Cambridge Scholar, Castelvecchi, Bloomsbury, etc.) and journals. She currently works on two books: Walking from Scores (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2022) and Walking, Listening, Sound-Making (Brussels: umland, 2022). She co-curates the series La Membrane with Lucien Gaudion and co-edits the column wi watt’heure of Revue & Corrigée with Carole Rieussec. As a curator and author, she has collaborated with or presented her projects in different venues/organizations, including Onassis Stegi (Athens) Sonic Protest (Paris), Festival Plataforma (Santiago de Compostela); Oscillation Festival, CIVA, Q-O2 (Brussels); Manifesta 13, Unité d’Habitation Le Corbusier, La Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille); Locus Sonus, Fondation Vasarely, 3bisF (Aix-en-Provence); soundpocket (Hong Kong); Standards (Milan); NUB (Pistoia); Radio India (Rome); Sant’Andrea degli Amplificatori, Xing, Radio Città Fujiko (Bologna); Zavod Cona (Ljubljana); Saout Radio; p-node; Sound Threshold (London).