lecture performances

Die Installation spielt mit Gegensätzen. Das mythologische trifft auf herkömmlichen Schmetterlingen, die Dehnung in die Weite trifft auf Verlängerung in der Vertikale. Die Farben sind ebenfalls warm oder kühl.

Die senkrechte Papierbahn, die auf dem Boden fällt und sich zusammenrollt, deutet auf die Wirkung der Schwerkraft. Die Schmetterlinge trotzen den Zog und fliegen empor. Die warme Farbe deutet auf die Sonnenenergie, die sie tanken müssen, um in die Luft schweben zu können.

Die dunkle Plexiglasscheibe sieht aus wie ein Bildschirm. In meinem Gehirn. Dort kommen alle Infos der Sinnen zusammen. Ich denke über das Minotaurus nach. Das Monster habe ich von einer antiken Vase kopiert. Es stellt einen Schauspieler da, der mit einer Maske erschreckend wirkt. Er läuft ins Bild von rechts hinein: aus dem Orient. Seine zu Hause auf Kreta ist auf der Seekarte Griechenlands zu erkennen. Angezeigt ist die Reise des Helden Theseus, der unterwegs seine Retterin auf der Insel Naxos zurücklassen wird. Dieser Dreieck ist der Drehpunkt der Komposition. Von links kommt eine imaginäre zusammengerollte Figur auf einem fliegenden Objekt ins Bild … eine Kollision ist unvermeidlich.

Ein Kubus kann in meiner Kunst ein Würfel sein für Jack in a Box. Gedanklich könnte das ganze Gebilde in sich kollabieren und ins Box verschwinden. Der Schmetterling öffnet und schließt seinen Flügeln. Wie ein Augenzwinkern. Damit die Uhr tickt. Wenn der Würfel auf der linken Seite ein Auge ist, dann stellt das Muster hinter dem Kleinen Feuerfalter die Netzhaut dar. Dort werden Farbverschiebungen notiert und weitergeleitet. Das bringt mich auf eine andere Idee. Vielleicht bildet der Fries oben die Augenbrauen, die Papierbahn eine Nase. Der Geruchssinn ist doch dabei. Der Würfelkasten muss das Auge des Zyklopen sein. Ein Monster wie das Minotaurus.

Weiterlesen > CELIA BROWN KUNSTGESPRÄCH

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The installation plays with contrasts. The mythological encounters ordinary butterflies drawn from life. The wide horizontal stretch is brought down to earth by a vertical roll of wallpaper. The warm or cool colours follow suit.

As the wallpaper touches the floor and begins to roll up, it points to the effect of gravity. The butterflies defy its pull and fly upwards. The warm colouring indicates the energy of the sun that they need to absorb in order to be able to become airborne.

The dark Perspex panel looks like a screen. It stands for what is going on inside my head, where the data from all my senses end up. I am thinking about the myth of the Minotaur. My drawing is taken from an antique vase. It shows an actor with a threatening mask. He enters the picture stage from the right. His home in Crete can be seen on the map of Greece. The journey of hero Theseus is indicated there, who will leave his helpmate Ariadne on the island of Naxos. This triangle is the focal point of the composition. From the left, an imaginary figure rolled up comes into the picture on a flying object… a collision is imminent.

In my art, a cube can be a box for Jack in a Box. In my mind, the whole structure could collapse into itself and disappear into the box. The butterfly opens and closes its wings. Like a wink. So that the clock ticks. If the cube on the left is an eye, then the pattern behind the Small Copper Butterfly represents the retina. This is where colour shifts are noted and transmitted. Which gives me another idea: perhaps the frieze at the top forms the eyebrows, and the vertical paper strip a nose. The sense of smell is thus also present. And a giant visage. The cube box must be the eye of the cyclops. A monster like the Minotaur.

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Observation of organic cells under the microscope in recent years has produced novel images that demand new interpretations. Mitochondria, the power houses within cells with their own DNA, can no longer be regarded as individual, static threads or little ‘sausages’ but appear as a electrically charged networks that are constantly splitting and joining.

The Chapel becomes a neuron stretching from brain to toe – a very long cell. The mitochondria have over a metre to travel in order to supply energy to the organist’s foot. The dancers represent loss and gain of energy through their movements, they cluster in groups and leap out ready and renewed.

Mitochondrien sind kleine Kraftwerke. Sie befinden sich in allen lebenden Zellen und besitzen ihre eigene DNS. Celia Brown hat ihren Vortrag „Der Traum der Mitochondrien“ genannt, als ob Mitochondrien von ihrer Vergangenheit träumen könnten. Bildbeispiele, Schattenwürfe, Objekte, zwei Sprecher: Am Aufbau der Metamorphosen von Ovid angelehnt erleben die ZuschauerInnen die Mitochondrien durch eine Reise in 15 Teilen.

Psyche and Alice

The fall of Alice also follows the trajectory of the tale of the beautiful Psyche, who fell from a mountaintop and eventually married her ‘beastly’ Amor. Psyche’s story is taken up again at the Mad Tea-Party.

Alice im Spiegelland (Hg. Celia Brown & Marion Mangelsdorf) 2012

Alice in Mirrorland was conceived by scientists and artists within the context of a collective initiative entitled Science meets Arts meets Science and developed into a ‘total art work’. The topics – the six impossible things Alice thought before breakfast – are brought into focus in Lecture Performances, as we have called our presentations: mirror images and their asymmetry in current debates concerning nature – the body – and culture are addressed in a dialogue between cultural anthropologists, representatives of the arts – fine art, theatre, music and dance – the neuro- and molecular-sciences, informatics and physics.

The artist Celia Brown, for whom such adventures are an integral aspect of her art practice, collaborated with academics and other artists to launch this project at the 550 jubilee of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg in 2007. Alice in Mirrorland was framed by an exhibition of the same name that took place at the municipal gallery of Freiburg Kunsthaus L6. Six Lecture Performances were presented in a lecture hall at the university parallel to the show, from 20 June to 25 July, and these formed the basis of the book Alice im Spiegelland eds. Celia Brown & Marion Mangelsdorf, Bielefeld:transcript 2012

Lewis Carroll: „Who are you?“ said the Caterpillar.

Alice enters the land of metamorphoses and shifts in perception. A scientific sketch of brainland conducted as a conversation on video between Sigrid Schmitz and Celia Brown is interrupted by dance interludes performed within an artificial brainland on stage. The collage is completed by quotations from the story of Alice in Wonderland delivered by Alice as a player in the performance.

Im Wald „in dem nichts einen Namen hat“ – in diesem Fall der Schwarzwald – verwandelt sich Alice in Rotkäppchen (Barbara Bausch) und trifft den Wolf. Ist der Wolf groß und böse, wird er sich als Rotkäppchens Oma verkleiden und sie auffressen? Nein, Alice bringt ihn als domestizierten Hund durch den Spiegel zurück.

In the wood ‘where nothing has a name’ Alice transforms into Little Red Riding Hood and meets a wolf. Is the wolf big and bad? Will it dress up as Red Riding-hood’s grandmother and eat her up? Not at all: Alice brings it back as a domesticated dog through the looking-glass.

Antimatter Alice dances in a chesspiecepiece as a quantum wave to a composition by George Chambers. The dancers take on the task of representing quantum states, travelling through space as a fluid group. The shape of this “wave” changes through time as the dancers make their own decisions about where to move. The physicist intervenes in order to demonstrate the result of a measurement on a quantum system. A Humpty Dumpty dance demonstrates why it should be impossible for time to go backwards in the quantum world. The dancers then separate into black and white chess pieces and make mirror image movements. When one figure meets its opposite, she or he lays down on the floor of the lecture hall. Finally, matter and antimatter cancel each other out leaving Alice and the scientist as the survivors.

Lewis Carroll: “Things flow about so here”
As the dancers move they represent the motion of the wave function which represents the probability of finding the particle rather than the motion of the particle itself. The process of measurement causes the wave function to collapse revealing the location of the particle. When matter and antimatter encounter one another, they annihilate in a burst of energy. The game of chess will be played to its ultimate conclusion: the creation of the Universe.

In “Mirrorland”, Britta Schinzel, Professor for Informatics, transforms into the Red Queen through the looking-glass and delivers her lecture in this role to the video camera. Armed with a chip-card and ruler, she marks out the squares of the chessboard. Alice moves across the squares and interprets the communication between head and a rebellious body-skeleton in a dance duet. Celia Brown and Sigrid Schmitz attempt to capture the meaning and interconnection of “I” and “Egg”. Meanwhile, Britta Schinzel and Constanze Kurz discover 6 impossible virtual things. Finally, the Red Queen sitting at her computer conducts the dance via a transponder which is apparently able to communicate with the RFID chip in the chip-card of the University of Freiburg.