Wild Card residencies for Ioana-Laura Gheorghiu & Irina Gheorghe in Brussels

Sent by the network partner 4Culture, the two Romanian artists were on a residency in Brussels hosted by workspacebrussels during which they worked on their latest productions:

Ioana-Laura Gheorghiu “Synthetic Sophisms”:
Testing reductions with a penchant for denotative perfection and maximum of synthesis: not necessarily false, but necessarily insufficient. There is nothing else but sound.
Following essentialization methods, speech is reduced to intonation, revealing the relation between content, sound and affect within speech. What is challenged is the notion that music is not semantically charged*.
The relation between rhythm and knowledge assimilation as conveyed by studies on musicality of speech sets the premises of an environment where sound is performing speech and intonation has autonomous meaning.
Working within the confines of this environment means testing perspectives on various connections between memory and sound (especially rhythm) as mediated by movement.
The project was initiated within the context of Black Hyperbox (workframe addressing the grey language negotiated between conceptual and performative strategies pertaining to the white cube and the black box, initiated by artists Florin Flueras and Alina Popa and hosted by The National Dance Center in Bucharest).
*Apart from particular musical sequences that are acknowledged to have explicit function (military march)
 
Irina Gheorghe “Foreign Language For Beginners”:
The l lies between the words and the worlds. Between the words lies the world. Between the worlds lies the word. The l between the words and the worlds lies. As anything placed in between, its character is ambiguous. The uppercase of I overlaps the lowercase of L, creating an imprecise zone of contact between the upper and the lower. As above, so below.

From the ancient Nazca lines in the desert in southern Peru to Carl Friedrich Gauss's 19th century proposal to draw a giant Pythagoras theorem on the Siberian tundra, from Lancelot Hogben's early radioglyph for interstellar communication - Astraglossa - and Hans Freudenthal's Language for Cosmic Intercourse - Lincos - in the 60s to pictorial messages such as the Pioneer Plaque, the Voyager probes and the Arecibo message in the 70s to more recent interstellar radio transmissions such as the early 2000s Cosmic Call, humans kept attempting to imagine and enable communication with extra-terrestrial worlds.

Foreign Language for Beginners explores the dynamics and history of this communication and that of an improbable first contact following the intersections of science fiction tropes and scientific research. It's a guide of conversation with the world outside the word by way of word, sound and movement, inside a room.

A first, mainly conceptual and text-based version of Foreign Language for Beginners was shown in tête Berlin and Atelier 35 Bucharest in 2015. This will be further developed into a research on movement and sound during the residency in Workspace Brussels and WASP Bucharest.