« The body is always elsewhere, elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged, it is in relation to it that there is a top and a bottom, a right and a left, a near and a far, the body is the zero point of the world, it is nowhere and yet at the heart of the world, it has no place and yet it is from it that all places emerge and radiate »
Michel Foucault, Le Corps utopique.
Meeting with Dominique Angel’s workshop. A look at our two workshops. Body sculpture – body in movement. Thanks to Dominique Angel.
The performance « à distance » was realized with Colette Colomb who is a musician, and it was during, and this during the period of confinement in France. We worked at a distance through screens and microphones, each one in its workshop where we tried to divert some parameters that the computer imposed on us. A work based on exchange, involving a hybrid digital writing combining visual and sound media.
Performance was realized during a residency in Hanoi with the dancers, Nguyen Dung Hanh and Tran Kha Ai.
The everyday city is a field of experience and enrichment that remains the raw material of the work. A collection of sounds and gestures of daily life is organized from routes in Hanoi. Gymnastics and dance are everywhere in this city.
“Daniel Rothbart was born in California and raised in Oregon, a state that faces Asia, a familiar fact with important implications for his art. Among the objects that wash up on the Oregon coast are floats from Japanese fishing nets : green glass globes of different sizes. Gathering a supply of these beach globes, Rothbart encases up to twenty of them in open structures of bent aluminum wire. Connecting the structures in a long, winding line, he produces a sculpture that looks like the house on the floor of a gallery and even more so when he floats it on a body of water. The surrounding currents bring this floating structure to life. …Less marked by the water than embraced by it, Rothbart’s glass and aluminum sculptures become elements perfectly integrated into their immediate environment. »
Flotilla, Daniel Rothbart’s constellation of floating sculpture, consists of aluminum arabesques welded around shapeshifting spheres of found glass, creating serpentine chain forms that move freely in the water. The COVID-19 pandemic along with storms and fires linked to climate change have underscored humankind’s vulnerability to adverse consequences of manipulating nature. Rothbart’s sculpture has origins in the distant past and implications for an uncertain future. This short film explores the installation from above, using radical perspectives, movement, and sound to explore the relationship between sculpture and the natural world. Drone videography by Alon Koppel. Empty Vessels Make the Loudest Sound by Patrick Grant © 2014 Peppergreen Media (ASCAP).
Accompanied by a reading of Dante’s Inferno, “Canto XIV” by Carlo Giuliano, this short film explores the relationship of Rothbart’s floating sculptures to their environment in the Hudson River from multiple perspectives. In the poem, Virgil explains the source of four rivers in the underworld. Tears flow from the cracks in a broken statue that lies beneath a mountain on the Island of Crete. Sited offshore, near rusty, delapidated equipment of a cement factory, this installation juxtaposes natural beauty and colorful sunsets of the Hudson River with industrial architecture that evokes human insensitivity and greed.