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Entrophy
Performance, duration ca 20 min
A three-performance programme (on-site and online) catalysed by the artist and conjured with the performers who co-create them through an experimental score belonging to no one. In a space of collaboration and not-knowing, the works unfold through chance, improvisation, shared in/capacities and desire. Moving across thresholds of perception, the performance(s) are inhabited by sound, infrasound and infrared light. Each has air and water; some have fire and only one has earth. Repeated twice at different tempos, time flows in many directions as well as through layered descriptions, interpretations and captions.
Score
A twist on the deductive reasoning game Twenty Questions, this performance score reflects the artist’s research into entropy, polyvocality and indeterminacy. Initiated by the artist, it is formed collectively with the performers who will stage it. With Zavitsanos in the role of the guesser, the performers are asked to think of ‘absolutely nothing’ before answering a set of twenty yes/no questions about the performance they will enact. Their answers determine the performances in a space of collaboration and not-knowing, unfolding through chance, improvisation, shared in/capacities and desire.
Credits of the performance
Initiator of the score: Constantina Zavitsanos
Performers and co-creators of the score: Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias
Voice and text: Angelo Custódio, Pedro Matias and Constantina Zavitsanos
Sound: Angelo Custódio
Costumes: Arthur Guilleminot
Credits of the event
Concept: Constantina Zavitsanos
Initiator of the score: Constantina Zavitsanos
Performers and co-creators of the score: Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex
Curator and production manager: Sara Giannini
Stage manager: Annick Kleizen
Set design: Constantina Zavitsanos with the performers
AV: Leroy Chaar
Light design: Marion Tränkle
In-house technician and floor manager: Thomas Myrmel
Live-stream production: Hans van Eck, Barry Jonas and Zsolt Szederkényi
Production assistance: Sancha Meca Castro
Photography: Prins de Vos
NGT interpreters and Dutch CART: Faye Schippers and Clarissa van den Elzen
ASL interpreters: Candace Davider and company
English CART: Veerle Haverhals
Audio description on-site and online: Constantina Zavitsanos
Front of house team: Naomi Collier Broms and Sancha Meca Castro
Accessibility advisors: Staci Bu Shea and Annick Kleizen
Zoom production advisors: Patrick Mahaney and Lauren Parrish
Accessibility financial support: I Wanna Be With You Everywhere
Commissioned work to Constantina Zavitsanos
by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
het Splendor, Amsterdam, NL
(2023)
Visitor report by Staci Bu Shea
unknown springs
Performance for voice and live electronics, duration ca 15 min
An invitation to a listening moment
(or perhaps a moment of self love)
unknown springs is sound performance for voice and live electronics addressing the disordering principle of desire. It attunes the audience to the sensuous and towards an embodied interiority that resonates with the vibrancy of the body.
Red Window Talk: Red Light Heritage
Oudekerk, Amsterdam, NL
(2023)
Photos: Maarten Nauw
Performance based on untamed disordering (2021)
Sonic poem for voice and live electronics, duration ca 3 min
In dialogue with the work “Queer Desire is Wild; I am a Deer“, 2014 by Nilbar Güreş
Commissioned by Van Abbemuseum
Part of Bodily Encounters Tour, Delinking and Relinking – New collection exhibition
Eindhoven, NL
Tender Attunements
Presentation ca 40 min & publication
Tender Attunements is a continuous research project in embodied theory making. Our collaboration is based on a shared commitment to queer-crip epistemologies and corpo-literate ways of teaching and learning. The project’s quest is driven by the critical appeal to prompt unlearning in and of habituated knowledge practices acquired as academics and artists, as writers and singers, as teachers and performers. Tender Attunements strives to provoke relational forms of listening between ourselves and our audience, which draw potency from those aspects of our practices that are “ephemeral, evanescent, undocumentable, and unknowable” (Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do). The aim is to set entrained forms of thinking, writing, listening, voicing and sounding in motion by creating situations of more sensuous social, political, personal and educational engagement. In Tender Attunements, theme/format and content/frame converge: they are meant to de-compose and re-compose one another.
Embodied Experiences: A corpo-conference on Art, Bodies & Identities
Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam NL
(2023)
Published in TOWARDS NEW SCHOOLS – epistemic shifts in art and design education: Essay 6
Extra Intra, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam NL
HUM (an/other)
Three channel audio-visual installation with haptic interface
Proxima, a machine learning system, reacts to human visitors through camera detection and processes sound and visuals. It generates non-linear narratives in pulsating vibrant utterances, creating a poetic space that reimagines body~world relations in tension with our world’s surveillance mechanisms. Whilst the AI ensures the performativity of the installation, visitors are invited to place a custom made tactile transducer and explore it on their own bodies. The work uses vibration to activate somatic memory, expanding the sense of ‘listening’ through touch and being in ‘touch’.
This intimate encounter between the Self and machine, relates surveillance and its impact in the coding of who we are and continuously become. The use of factual data for control and capital development contributes to an apparatus that feeds into our fear of the unknown (…Who is writing who in the end?). Thus, the work seeks to destabilize these vicious cycles, aligning with a regenerative direction in resonance with the Self and its processes, rather than towards a techno fetishised future.
Credits
Concept and direction: Angelo Custódio
Live electronics and programming: Tatiana Rosa
Image direction and editing: Pedro Matias
Text and voice: Angelo Custódio
Technical support: Michele Abolaffio
Design development and wearables: Arthur Guilleminot
Proximity Music: Deep in Afterthought, Rewire Festival 22, The Hague, NL
Supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Stichting Stokroos and Stroom Den Haag
&
Prospects 22 – Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam, NL
Supported by Mondriaan Fonds
(2022)
O Permuto
Performance, duration ca 50 min
o Permuto (the Exchange), submerses the audience in a continuous sound of dripping and other dramaturges of attunement. It leaks shared crip experiences of failure, deficit and deviation that overflow from reflections on the disciplinary practices of classical singing, competitive swimming and drawing. The disabling effects of the ongoing demands for efficiency question the straighter and more linear approaches to life.
[PT]
Numa temporalidade suspensa, ouvem-se dois corpos em permuta. Gota a gota, o gesto das suas corporeidades dissidentes ecoa no espaço – ressonâncias de um diálogo do dar e do receber. A cada exalar, a tensão do transpirar. A cada pulsar, o suavizar da contenção.
A performance “O Permuto” nasce das interlocuções poéticas entre Ângelo Custódio e Daniel Moraes. Os artistas investigam o incorporamento que intersecta o déficit, a falha e o desvio. Ao entrelaçar as linhas disciplinares da voz, do desenho e do desporto, transbordam experiências da (d)eficiência. As suas vivências revelam rastros subjetivos que questionam orientações retilíneas e lineares.
O Permuto traz um ambiente íntimo e estranhamente familiar onde o gesto e a voz têm uma dialética diagonal própria. O visitante é submerso numa dramaturgia de sintonização e convidado a estar à deriva durante a performance.
Credits
Concept, direction and performance: Daniel Moraes e Ângelo Custódio
Sound composition, text and voice: Ângelo Custódio
Scenography: Victor Gonçalves
Costumes: Arthur Guilleminot
Communication design: Vivóeusėbio
Light Design: Rui Alves
Video documentation: Inês Sambas
Photography: Patty Black
Espaço do Tempo, Montemor-o-Novo, PT
(2022)
Supported by BPI and “La Caixa”
QueerAble in/stabilities
Video (live streamed performance), duration ca 40 min
immersive
murmurings
muted cries
vocal shapeshifters
resilient bio-geometries
in a uttered (de)composition of sonic textural layers
In QueerAble in/stabilities other embodiments are trans*lated into sound through a wireless electro-acoustic interface assembled to the body. The upright posture movement is trans*formed into a continuous spiraling motion.
QueerAble is an inquiry into notions of encountering and systemic surveillance. Subjectivities undergo processes of in/stability with the norm body, the norm movement, the norm behaviour, the norm morals (…) — a process continuously reinforced by the surveillance of the gaze. Committing to the vulnerability of this conflict can potentially de/stabilise hegemonic narratives.
Credits
Concept, direction, text and voice: Angelo Custódio
Live electronics: Tatiana Rosa
Image direction: Pedro Matias
Technical support: Michele Abolaffio
Design development and wearables: Arthur Guilleminot
Supported by Mondriaan Fonds
(2021)
Research presented at Platform in Action
Part of the exhibition Inefficient Tools for Quantified Beings Exhibition – Hackers & Designers
FUSE, Amsterdam NL
Photos: Philip Ullman
Breathing /sites
Participatory performance of fluctuating duration
Culture’s ‘airborne’ transmitted codes insist in censoring the body, and in inscribing its desirable patterns. Although their technologies work on the plasticisation of the human, through several modes of reproduction, the phenomenon of breathing also prompts embodied flows of resistance. It emanates vibrating intensities of a forever evolving form of intimacy, a resonance that when listened to agitates the stagnation of binary boundaries.
Breathing /sites is an invitation to attune with the softening waves of breath. Its score generates a sonic moment based on a situational exchange between bodies in space. The participants are invited to activate the space and embody an act of generosity by breathing to prescribed patterns — a pneumatic continuum where the boundaries between leisure and labor are blurred. In exchange, the breath composition arouses the improvised utterances of Angelo Custódio and Yara Said. From this interplay emerges a liminal moment in which bodies encounter an affective interchange among strangers.
Credits
Concept: Angelo Custódio
Voice: Yara Said and Angelo Custódio
Photos: Müge Yilma
Research supported by Mondriaan Fonds
Presentation supported by Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst
Four Siblings, Amsterdam NL
(2021)
Underbelly Resonances
Presentation, ca 40 min
Angelo Custódio and Jules Sturm experiment with “embodied theory making”. Artist and theorist bring their divergent knowledge practices on queer, vulnerable, gestating and crip embodiment in conversation. Based on their shared research in writing, reading, voicing, sounding and moving they create a dialogic encounter around cognitive and bodily experiences of unlearning.
Reading Bodies! Cruising Corpoliteracy in Arts, Education and Everyday Life
HKW, Berlin DE
(2019)
A Horse Riding a Tongue
Performance, duration ca 30 min
Iteration for three breathers and an acousmatic voice
A series of vulnerable utterances, embodied monstrosities, leak from a wild tongue.
Silencing it only excites the inner ‘wild (dark)horse’.
Breath holds to anxiety and allows tension releasing, an embodied phenomena in dialogic relation with the world. (It)s indeterminacy and wild nature are intrinsically part of our Human condition. A non fixity in resilient cyclic movements that animate and support our transformative flows.
Credits
Performing on camera: Bin Koh, Miyuki Inoue and Juri Suzuki
Voice: Angelo Custódio
Audio-visual support: André Lourenço
Photos: Anne-Laure Ruffi
Presented at Lavish are the Dead exhibition by Juri Suziki,
NEVERNEVERLAND, Amsterdam NL
(2020)
Previous iterations:
BallRoom Zuidoost (2019) Graduation exhibition, Master of Voice (MoV), Sandberg Instituut (2018)
