Photo by Dean Kavanagh
The projector has the ability to press
a bullet into some old wound and only days later does the casing suppurate and
the contents bleed into my system. This is how I feel about Gorging Limpet and this
bears as much on the experiences I bring as a spectator as it does on the
specific performance itself. I thought that now would be a suitable time for me
to send on this very small document on my experiences as a member of the
audience: an onlooker/silent participant.
“Gorging Limpet” is defined as a collaborative performance/installation
project by Karen Power and Maximilian Le Cain.
Karen Power is an Irish composer, educator, improviser and
academic who writes primarily for acoustic and electroacoustic forces. The two
primary sources in her creative output; acoustic instruments and everyday
sound-objects and soundscapes. I first came across Powers’ work when I saw
“Involuntary Participation”, a beautiful collaborative film between herself and
Maximilian Le Cain for Seesound in 2010.
Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker, cinephile and critic. He
has made more than 80 short, medium and feature length experimental films and
videos over the past decade. I was first introduced to the universe of Le Cain
in 2010 by filmmaker, cinephile (and another universe unto himself) Rouzbeh
Rashidi at a screening of “(An)Other Irish Cinema” in Dublin which featured
films by Rashidi, Le Cain, and Irish/New York based filmmaker and critic Donal
Foreman.
“Gorging Limpet” is described as follows:
Using
sound, film and video, Gorging Limpet events
draw on post-industrial space to create an uncanny vision of a world that
remains almost, but not quite, recognizable. A mysterious zone of elusive
sounds and mysterious images that powerfully interact to immerse viewers in a
ghostly realm of submerged memory. The substance of this vision is the textures
of the places evoked and the materials used, the decaying fabric of old
buildings and old 16mm, 8mm and VHS images, of forgotten corners and uncannily
familiar, if unsettlingly hard-to-place, sounds.
- Maximilianlecain.com
GL is entirely site-specific and I had the good fortune for
having attended most of the performances so far. Each space was taken into account
so as when GL moved to the next space, remnants of the previous were preserved
and contained in the present. This process of accumulation and digestion is
very interesting and even results in an unusual and mysterious nostalgia.
I recall the strange trip to a Cork industrial estate and
the disused space of H7, where the birth would take place. It was June 2013 and
extremely bright outside, there were destroyed cars, dormant coaches, an old
American style diner on my left and the sound of machinery filling the spaces
in between and sinking down into the cavernous dark of the open factories all
around. On the right was a large dark brick electric power station; it was
abandoned and the large banks of transformers and pole cables stretched around
the corner towards a vibrating church that fed into the back of more industrial
units. It was hard to believe that this was even part of the Cork Midsummer
Festival- considering the chosen space on the outskirts. With that and the
performance itself, GL could have easily toured from place to place like a
wasteland circus, in tow filmmaker Michael Higgins (here as performer and chief
of 16mm degradation).
The interior of H7 was almost chambered and empty at first,
then a few metres in were 4 or 5 aisles of chairs preceding a large desk with
chair, a small table with two S8mm projectors, a standard projection screen, a
medium plinth on top of which sat a 16mm projector. On a small custom level
rested a macbook set by Karen Power. With the overheads killed the space looked
like a destroyed print of a 50s science fiction film: lightless apart from a
rather large industrial fan turning in the draft by the entrance. This was soon
blacked.
The industrial estate was silent. Once the safety
instructions were read aloud the audience was led into H7 and seated. The sound
was already low. It was a very foreboding atmosphere perhaps the combination of
the location, the safety/warning, and the single-file procession into the black
unknown attributed to this. It reminded me of the first time I was brought to a
carnival and was lead to the ghost train or house of mirrors. Once the first moments
of sound and seeping light began to harmonise the dread dissipated leaving only
the mystery and wonder. This very matter-of-fact and general procedure seemed
to unearth certain memories for me, and these seemed to fluctuate and integrate
with parts of the performance. Some of these memories remained quite buoyant
for the majority of the experience.
Some months later, artist/researcher Esperanza Collado
curated an evening of EFS films on behalf of Experimental Film Club in the
Irish Film Institute, Dublin. This was concluded with a performance of “Gorging
Limpet Materials” described as a pocket-sized version of the previous outing in
H7. GL-M took place in a medium sized room overlooking the cobbled streets.
In this environment the quad sound set-up was closer,
sacrificing volume for detail. Lacking the large set-up of H7, the visual
arrangement was pared down. The screen (this time included digital video
projection alongside S8mm) was layered outward creating a three-dimensional
effect. While the previous event coiled itself around steel and cement roots
within the bowels of an industrial estate, GL-M found itself drifting through
the monotone pavements of an urban space. The addition of a monochrome video
projection of a wet pavement passing, halting and fading into light provided
quite a different backdrop for the intermingling of sound and space. The same
super8 reels presented again (with the scars of the previous performance)
firing against sheets of pavement, buildings and fences through a red lit
universe all crawling back to the towering cement-works on the banks of the
docklands: the Limpet’s birthplace. The clicking and churning soundscape
evolving with new details giving rise to a red flickering light that scanned a
seated and standing audience. With the eventual invasion of outside sound Power
never retaliated by punching the volume or distorting any of the sounds. She
held her position firmly, maintaining the natural growth of the piece, which
ended strongly once again with the sound of the Limpet in its new feeding
grounds.
The third sighting of the Limpet was at the National Concert
Hall as part of the New Music Dublin Festival. The room this time far larger
with a wooden floor. The sonic spread was further and the visuals once again
evolved.
The first event at the Midsummer Festival (2013) was
deliberately seated. GL-M at Temple bar gallery was seated initially though
once capacity was reached people stood and sat on the floor. GL-M at NCH was
entirely standing, and initiative was given to the audience to walk around,
investigate in an attempt to change perspective and edit the experience
spatially, this was a fantastic experience.
While in H7 the viewers were confronted with physical
movement, large adjacent 16mm projection, 2x super8, the experience was translated
with the turn of your head- much like a fixed position camera set-up, the
experience could only be altered with a pan or a tilt. With the introduction of
the protruding screens at Temple Bar Gallery the audience could experience a
totally different event based on the seat they chose and its view of the
screen.
In NCH, while still remaining dark, a dull light invaded the
room with slow diffusion due to position of window, the season and time of day.
The audience now had the permission, the space, and visual confidence from the faint
light to become mobile participants. You could move in and out of perspectives,
even move closer to the speakers or to the projectors. You could experience the
entire performance in motion if you so wished. Shadows from one screen fell
further onto the next the further you shifted; the space between the screens
was dark, nothingness but there was an energy there, it became ghostly. What was
this void between the images; what exists between the frames of a moving image?
There was an energy. Perhaps it was this energy that was the sustenance of Gorging
Limpet.
Karen would interact to the small sounds around her and
seeing people move between the sonic zones she would introduce new elements to
one, diffuse them with another, isolate certain particles to front and to the
rear. The sounds were moving inward and outward with a very fluid and invisible
hand as ideas were forming and treating themselves to moments of air within the
quadrophonic space. The projector fired off and the interaction was clearly building
towards crescendo, all the while feeding into the sound pool that we were
circling like debris going down the drain. The projector span out noisily. Max
threw a black sheet over the projection screen and then a white one over that. The
building atmosphere had leveled to the point of cinematic séance. He
investigated the folds and shapes of the sheet with a lighter. There was
something purely magical and ritualistic here. The atmosphere was extremely
tense. In the darkness the sheet was illuminated selectively for investigation.
For a moment it appeared like the face of a large iceberg, crackling and
fortified with shadow. The flame was out. The projector shuddered to a halt.
The waters calmed and the small flickering picture from the tiny monitor was
all that remained still rolling its dead transmission. The sound isolated
itself to one side and the gorging limpet could be heard through the stillness
of the room.
The performance returned to Cork at Triskel Art Centre in late
May. This was the culmination of a weeklong residency at Corcadorca’s Theatre
Development Centre. The event was to be a reworking of the previous performance
at NCH and contained the same elements: the red flickering torch, the
monochrome video, 1x super8 projection, quad sound, miniature monitor, candle,
sheets, lighter.
The space in the theater was far removed from the spread of
the room at NCH, the semicircular presentation at Temple Bar Gallery, the semi-cathedral
of H7. This was a long and narrow space with a high ceiling and set against a
large projection screen half cloaked in bundled blackout drapes and a ladder. With
the house lights on, the textured presence of raised grey brick columns, a rectangular
screen on the back wall, a separate square projection screen and drapes all
presented in this tall long, narrow space collectively resembled a cluster of
aspect ratios gone insane.
Once the overheads were killed the throw of the video
reached out over the square screen and onto the rectangular screen and across
the back wall. The S8mm (now beautifully destroyed with the destructive history
of the previous performances) warmly fleshed over the central screen. This was
an extension of the previous two GL-M events, the introduction of the layered
screens in Temple Bar and NCH now pushed to accommodate the part of the room as
a screen once again similar to the S16mm in H7. As video image dimly moved
towards illumination and cast itself onto the back wall, the blackout curtains disassembled
it into various shapes. The flickering red light found its way onto the S8mm
footage once again and spilled over illuminating the items that rested against
the back wall. Though the performance space had significantly shrunk since H7,
it had become more refined as the images and light rose against the back wall,
towering above the audience who arranged themselves within the sonic space. The
attempted lighting of the candle was very powerful here (the darkest space yet);
the orange light momentarily took Max’s face and hands as he approached the
tiny monitor.
The S8mm projection was shut off and the tiny monitor was
left to bleed its transmission. The sound once again grew quite placid- in fact
more placid than in any performance before. The sound of seagulls was audible
from behind and soon drew off into the distance. The sound of the limpet
feeding became clear once again. There was a strange sense of nostalgia to this
performance: the footage of waterways, and cement buildings that had domineered
H7 and Temple Bar have slid away leaving the urban movements of the footpath to
merge with the dockland sounds of the industrial estate, its primogenial home.
Photo By Dean Kavanagh
The history of GL and its connections to other films through
spaces and reverberation through time are very interesting to me. The docklands
have been a fixture of Le Cain’s films for a long time, if not physically at
least in thought: decay, wasteland, steel, concrete, liquid, shade/light,
movement of machinery, a tactile movement in a place that appears deceased. To
my knowledge his most recent foray into the wasteland was for “Arkady Feed”
with Paul Hegarty (Seesound 2013).
Returning to the H7 unit was made in Le Cain and Rashidi’s
collaborative film “H7HSP170 Regression”, here we can see John McCarthy
drifting phantom-like through the space, beside the large fan and into the
small kitchen. McCarthy also appeared projected in 16mm as part of the initial
GL in H7. Michael Higgins also filmed much footage in and around the units
during his time in the space.
Through Esperanza Collado’s programme “Spectres of Memory”, I
felt a very strong link between Rouzbeh Rashidi’s “HSP 150”, Michael Higgins’
“Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep” and the performance of “Gorging Limpet
Materials”. There is a clear interaction with a personal film history and with
the very devices and apparatus of filmmaking in “HSP 150”. In Higgins’ “Some
Must Watch While Some Must Sleep” we can see rot and decay as proof of life;
the lives and shapes that breed under the flurry of shifting decay and damage
which is both form and content. Higgins assisting in the hand processing of
16mm for GL H7 and participating as a performer at these first 3 events is
further proof that Power and Le Cain are keen to explore this specific area of
blight and decomposition even further within itself to find the history and
phantoms trapped in everything. For me, they all merged into one another for a
night process that was the culmination of Collado’s programme.
It is this idea of accumulation and absorption that exists
so strongly in Gorging Limpet. I was very fortunate to catch visual artist
Atoosa Pour Hosseini’s mesmerizing exhibition “Luminosity” at the Cork Film
Centre Gallery in 2013. In the main projection room she had set up two video
projections, one of a mysterious object and the other opposing video was
extremely minimal with use of a rectangular graphic. The varying light
intensity of these two pieces in such close quarters was beautiful; the
diffused light from both projections mixing and polluting the images morphing
the entire room into a large texture itself. What is most striking with her
works is that with each new video there is a ghost of the previous one. In time
her works will act as some infinity mirror into themselves, each shift and
change fading into the next.
Furthermore, in Rouzbeh Rashidi’s “Homo Sapiens Project” we
see an internal feeding frenzy of cinema. Rashidi has recycled many of his
early films into new entities and has continued to do so beyond HSP with feature
length works like “Theory”, “Hypothesis” and now his upcoming film
“Conditions”. Gorging Limpet takes the idea of infinity to it’s own metabolic
level, though not as cannibalistic, the Limpet accumulates haunting memories of
its previous hunting grounds in its own process of assimilation.
Gorging Limpet has carried within itself a very sensitive
ability at creating a power. The more it moves from site to site the more its
history becomes available, and it is a surprisingly tactile and not so alien history.
Along the way it has become more complex and developed a subtle nostalgia for
certain spaces and atmospheres. It learned this through what it consumed. And
it is the ritual of feeding that I find so fascinating: Le Cain attempts to
light the candle, approach the white sheet with the fire, the glowing miniature
monitor and the presence of sound that is inextricably linked to everything in
the dark. Now I look forward to where the future feeding grounds lie, perhaps a
deep cave, a castle or even a nocturnal exterior performance would provide
suitable vegetation.
Maximilian
Le Cain and Karen Power are not just creators but summoners of the Gorging
Limpet and partners in crime culpable for the large scale damage caused by the
creature breaking free from its concrete home and into your mind. It is this
rather exaggerated image that is so wonderful- the magnification of all things
impossible to see with the naked eye. Whether it is the frequencies deployed in
the soundscape or the sound of the limpet itself, the attention to detail and
the desire to bring these artifacts to the forefront is at the core of the
project. A memory is shared and created with these everyday items and spectral
impressions and it is one that is simultaneously strong and elusive. There is a
feeling roused by the knowledge that something is always there; though it is
impossible to hear and we are incapable of seeing, its presence on the planet
is as old as we are. However, with study and scientific methods we have made
the invisible visible and the inaudible audible, and with Gorging Limpet, as
with cinema, we are one step closer to our memories, fantasies and nightmares.
- Dean Kavanagh - June 2014
