Shelter or Playground: The House of Dust at the Schindler House
Henry Anderson & Bryana Fritz / Slow Reading Club
Horizon Sucker
2018
Two channel video, audio (voice: Tom Engels), satin ribbons, stitching, steel frame.
Horizon Sucker is a format for gathering, handling, and surfacing materials. Thinking of The House of Dust in its initial form as a computer-assisted poem, in which the construct of ‘house’ becomes an index for locating form, volume, and habitability within the abstract space of computer processing, Horizon Sucker uses instances of disjointed body parts as a means of locating proximities through and behind the architecture of the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The body here is never formally coherent. It is understood through ruptured surfaces, wounds, and through dis- and re- membering parts. Wounds which break the body into parts—not necessarily at its languaged seams. For Shelter or Playground, Horizon Sucker assumes the form of a computer-assisted poem. The text is written by locating specific body terminology in backlogs of read and unread PDFs, and suturing them together into approximations of sense. In the installation, the poem is clad with sound and video materials projected onto both the hard surface of the house itself and onto a free-standing woven screen; their hardness and softness variously producing and contouring the legibility of the poem.
Collective reading session by Slow Reading Club with a tea serving by Hannah Mjølsnes
Slow Reading Club is a semi-fictional reading group initiated by choreographer Bryana Fritz and artist Henry Andersen. They deal in constructed situations for collective or individual performed reading where “meaning” passes between choreographed bodies. SRC seeks to occupy and eroticise this space of transmission between text and reader, reader and reader, text and text. They want to dwell in the unstable space of reading itself. They want to intensify what Spivak calls “the possible menace of a space outside of language” that is opened in reading and in love. SRC produce collection of writings publication as a material for the collective reading. Each text is paired with a specific protocol that seeks to interrupt the surety of its reading - e.g. the public might be asked to read via a stroboscope, or while maintaining skin contact with a partner, or by reading aloud each line from the text twice. A number of technologies borrowed from club-culture are employed to ease the collective body into reading - late night, long duration, alcohol, honey-yellow lighting, a tea that makes the mouth go numb. SRC does not seek to understand the text, but to generate contact - skin over syntax, flesh refusing flesh.