Monday, January 27, 2014

Oporto apresenta #32


"Grimoire Magnétique"
A musical video-poem by Joëlle de La Casinière

Video U-matic transferred to digital, color, sound, 26', 1982


There was a time when humans still believed in video as a valid poetic medium and television as a means  for the outreach of art . Back then, poets happily abandoned their pens and notebooks, painters abandoned brush and canvas for the promised horizons of the video fields. 
But then came the dark ages and art was expelled from the broadcast schedule. However, some artists maintained their faith in a poetic video core and in its democratic assumptions. Joëlle de La Casinière is a writer that belongs to a community of such believers,who still see the medium as prime poetic substance.
It is hard to find a work as committed and joyful as La Casinière's. Her videos are a  collage of vibrating moving images, from all sorts of backgrounds (found, pop, kitsch, home and computer…) woven together to create a new language embedded in pulsating energy. 
Grimoire Magnétique, in La Casinière's words, is not a film, a show or a book. It is neither a video-game or an opera. Rather, it's a multilayered magnetic tapestry, of  colorful sound and image, the illuminated story of the life and death of the Persian mystic and revolutionary Sufi, Hallâj al-Mansûr.

"A triumph of the electronic image over universal gravity"
Words taken from Nam June Paik


Friday, January 31, 10.30pm 

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