still act

 

to initiate the subject in a different relationship with temporality. Stillness operates at the level of the subject’s desire to invert a certain relationship with time, and with certain (prescribed) corporeal rhythms. Which means that to engage in stillness is to engage into different experiences of perceiving one’s own presence. This is anthropologist and cultural critic Nadia Seremetakis’ insightful notion of the“still act.” For Seremetakis “still acts” are those moments of pause and arrest in which the subject --by physically introducing a disruption in the flow of temporality -- interpellates “historical dust.”

 

Against the flow of the present, -- writes Seremetakis -- there is a stillness in the material culture of historicity; those things, spaces, gestures, and tales that signify the perceptual capacity for elemental historical creation. Stillness is the moment when the buried, the discarded, and the forgotten escape to the social surface of awareness like life-supporting oxygen. It is the moment of exit from historical dust.

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/André Lepecki/

 

Lethe

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(Greek: “Oblivion”),

 

in Greek mythology, daughter of Eris (Strife) and the personification of oblivion. Lethe is also the name of a river or plain in the infernal regions.

In Orphism, a Greek mystical religious movement, it was believed that the newly dead who drank from the River Lethe would lose all memory of their past existence. The initiated were taught to seek instead the river of memory, Mnemosyne, thus securing the end of the transmigration of the soul. At the oracle of Trophonius near Lebadeia (modern Levadhia, Greece), which was thought to be an entrance to the underworld, there were two springs called Lethe and Mnemosyne.

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britannica.com

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director, concept: Réka Szűcs 

choreography, performing: Lísandra Týra Jónsdóttir

photography: Carlo Cupaiolo

editor: András Kovács E.

sound design: Rudolf Várhegyi HAES

sound assist: Márk Puszta

producer: Kristóf Helyei, Miklós Holczer, Réka Szűcs

co-producer: Carlo Cupaiolo (IT), Hrafnhildur Einarsdóttir (IS)

stills: Réka Szűcs
​​​supporters: 4CUT, Apodosz Alapítvány, NKA

thanks to: Krisztina G. Agueda, György Holczer

produced by: ©Értékmegőrző|SAFE Art Studio, FWD Youth Company (IS)