Nicoline van Harskamp (winner of the 2009 Prix de Rome) has been working with notions of speech, language and the power of utterance within public and more formally discursive spaces for some time. In May this year she staged a series entitled ‘The Power of Listening’ where she asked:
“What happens in our heads when we listen to public speakers? Do the things we hear add up to a collective field of knowledge? Does this field have substance? Does it have language? And can it be made instrumental in politics?” (text taken from Nicoline van Harskamp, 2009)
In an incredible twist, van Harskamp focused not only on the moment of information exchange or conversation but also in the restance, in the afterlife of what was or was not communicated in those moments. She asked 5 experts to respond to the questions above at what she calls a ‘public meeting’ in the Frascati Theatre and during the following weeks, interviewed the members of the audience who had heard them to see how much they had retained or rejected from those presentations. Their rememberances and impressions were the basis for a reconstruction of the event which was then scripted and staged as “The Power of Listening”, which the artist desrcibes as ‘a staged panel discussion with as many loops, misinterpretations and black holes as the brain and memory itself.’
This kind of shift, in time, position, and expectation provides some intriguing new directions for both the artist but also the discussions around the Usual Suspects format, and a discursive turn in contemporary art in general.
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