#Life Time

CONCORDIA 01 is the debut instalment in an ongoing series of nocturnal performance films by Lafawndah and Trustfall.

Armed with a centuries-spanning songbook and an unmistakable visual style, the CONCORDIA series is intended as a bridge from waking to sleeping. Here, dream and fantasy are spiked with the artists’ signature lysergic touch and musical unpredictability.
In this episode, specially created for Lifetime, Lafawndah and Trustfall follow the red thread between Beverley Glenn Copeland, Throbbing Gristle, Scott Walker, Pentangle, and Brigitte Fontaine + Areski Belkacem. By turns terse, expansive, sensual and scorched, these songs are explored for their mystery and playfulness.

The CONCORDIA series aims to uncover the immense in the intimate. These are ballads for the frontier incidents between one world and the other.

*Film by Claire Arnold, Set Design and Lighting by Ylan Lucas

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The projects by Mélanie Matranga generally echo the state of our sensations and the notion of intimacy. Especially for Lifetime, Mélanie Matranga recorded Reading, superimposition and juxtaposition of sound layers of various natures: texts by Jacques Rigaut, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ingeborg Bachmann are intermingled with sounds, songs and melodies from the discotheque of Quentin Vandewalle, co-founder of the Antinote label.

"I don't have much to say, as there's too much going on all around me that leaves me speechless.
And yet, even if words accumulate at the bottom of the throat without any meaning being able to trace its path, one must speak, communicate, exchange... In order to escape this "legitimate" boredom, this boredom that does not lead to Rome, as described by Jacques Rigaut.
So I picked up in Quentin Vandewalle's discotheque, and in my library, to find people who talk, eternally, in a loop on discs and over the pages. I address you with the words of others, because I don't have much to say, as there's too much going on, all around, which leaves me speechless... "

For Lifetime, Laure Prouvost offers us her film We Know We Are Just Pixels for viewing. Attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects, she makes the images converse with each other and discuss, in front of the spectator, their existences and their vulnerabilities. The images want to be more than just pixels; they want to explore and exist outside of the machine upon which they are being played.

“We Know We Are Just Pixels becomes extra meaningful given the current situation of social distancing and expansive digital communication. As the longing for physical contact with all that's left behind, excluded from our intimate bubble, is growing, the confrontation with flat, pixelated images gets more painful. Therefore let's caress the pixels and accept the value of their non-material being. You and I, we know that we're only pixels too.” Laure Prouvost

Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels), carlier | gebauer (Berlin and Madrid) and Lisson Gallery (London, New York, and Shanghai).

Born in Honduras, Philippe Hallais aka Low Jack is one of the most interesting electronic music producers on the French scene. He keeps one foot in club culture while probing abstract sound experiments with noise or drone.

For "Lifetime", he offers us a unique mix of dub and futuristic mutations, inspired by the multiplicity of musical languages associated with subcultures.

Tracklist: Carl Bradney / The Dynamites / Jah Joe / Clancy Eccles / The Wailers / Singers & Players / Jojo Hookim / Alpha & Omega Ft. Nishka / Merciless / Intense / Mad Professor / Mad P. / Jackie Brown/ Big Youth / Augustas Pablo / John McLean / Robert Lee / The Hax

Through a conversation with Clément Delépine - curator and director of the Paris International Fair - the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, author of "La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange" and "Métamorphoses", discusses especially for Lifetime how the current pandemic is accelerating the end of a world.

He analyses our relationship to living beings, be they humans, bacteria, viruses, plants, or animals and how our relationship to other species must be rethought in order to imagine other futures.


“It is difficult to know what kind of world will await us when we emerge from this crisis. But what is certain is that the arrival of this pandemic has accelerated the end of a world that was already in agony and brings a future that is quite open, both frightening and full of hope”

For Lifetime, Melika Ngombe Kolongo aka Nkisi - a leading figure in today's experimental music - composed Orb, a sonic and visual exploration of the cosmos.

This work, inspired by Steve Coleman's essay "Regarding the sonic symbolism of when and where", is based on the premise that cosmic dynamics are also sounds and music. Nkisi is particularly interested here in the phenomenon of orbs, their manifestations and rhythms, and how they affect beings.

Nkisi uses music and sound to reveal the phenomena of living things, especially cosmic vibrations.

“You don’t need to see to know it’s there,
We experience through sound,
Everything within everything,
Diffusion of energy,
Intentions, distortions,
And we are in touch with the unconscious...”
Nkisi

note: to listen with eyes open or closed…

For Lifetime, the German artist Katinka Bock offers a work that has not been shown much to date.

The video, filmed in Super 8, is inspired by a tale about the lives of the inhabitants of Shilda, the Schildbürgers. The women of Shilda are annoyed to see their companions permanently monopolized by the king and give them an ultimatum to free themselves. It is then decided to give up their intelligence completely, in order to be less desired by the royalty. Even today in the German language, the word Schildbürger is still used to describe a "simpleton", a "hurluberlu". One day, during a war, the Schildbürgers took the bronze bell from their church to hide it under water. In order to be able to find its location once the war was over, they decided to mark the spot where the bell had sunk on the wall of their boat... Then they returned home.
This tale inspired Katinka to make the video "Seechameleon".

In 12 years of existence and under the direction of Bill Kouligas, Pan has never ceased to push the limits of musical genres towards undiscovered territories. His mix specially conceived for "Lifetime" is no exception to this and offers us in 24 tracks a staggering panorama of what should, without a doubt, compose our musical landscape in the coming months!

Bill Kouligas also accompanies this mix with a visual specially created for the occasion.

For Lifetime, through a "home session", Tujiko Noriko lets us glimpse into her creative process while guiding us through her house.

From this isolated wandering emerges a delicate poetry of everyday life, children's toys lying around, the plic-ploc of an old tap, Japanese kites drying in the wind... Through this short film, Tujiko Noriko invites us to mentally navigate into the passages that open up to us - be they sound or visual - and gradually plunges us into a dreamy fugue.

"I tried to do the best of our confinement, staying together and united".

Specially for Lifetime, Cally Spooner offers us a score of 29 drawings as well as a film of Maggie Segale dancing the drawings.

"SWEAT SHAME ETC. (Pencil, colored pencil and ink on technical paper, plastic) is a score of 29 drawings to be shown at a moment of temporal, economic, managerial and physical stagnation. In the drawings, hastily sketched figures are maintaining their bodies, despite losing underpants, socks and limbs. Their heads are erased. They are buoyant. Beginning in the deep time emotional muscles of a locked-down, static body, the drawings move through a stretch chart, gone slightly berserk. They end in Cartesian sabotage; a call for the individual and social body to lose its managerial head, reveal its physical condition, and endure. Now that we exist in an ongoing, day-to-day present tense, a difference that will make all the difference is not in macro visible muscles, nor the big projects, or a storyboarded plot, but in tiny local links and counter-moves. These vibrate through bodies, brains and environments, rustling about in doorways, missing the big-screen action, losing their managerial, future orientated head, re-working their present-tense grammar. The score is accompanied by a film of Maggie Segale dancing the drawings, in a rehearsal for what was to come, at Swiss Institute, New York, in December 2018." Cally Spooner

Cally Spooner
SWEAT SHAME ETC., 2018
Pencil, colored pencil and ink on technical paper, plastic
Courtesy of the artist and gb agency, Paris
Private Collection

In this choreographed ronde by Yasmine Hugonnet and filmed by Mathieu Bouvier, the distant bodies engage in a slow process of coming together that the camera observes in a close shot, on the scale of skin, concentration, tenacity.

An altogether movement to contemplate during the lockdown - exceptionally for Lifetime.
"The ronde is the space that takes time to change one body into another. Each body unrolls in the body following the dance of a common body".

Picking fragments from the continuous flow of words and opinions that circulate daily, the Amsterdam-based artist Nora Turato creates text works with a touch of “déjà vu”.

Collecting absurd, suprising or evocative comments, Nora Turato is inspired by the omnipresence and power of langage as it describes our condition and outlook on the world.
Especially for Lifetime, the artist offers a series of 5 works for free download - imagined as screen savers!
Partly commissioned by Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen

⇪ thanks, i hate it_iphone
⇪ my small screen distracts me from my big screen_4k
⇪ let’s never be like that_smartphone_tablet
⇪ it seems the ice cream licked back
⇪ i wake up and go insane_ipad

Choreographer Volmir Cordeiro and Bruno Pace, in close collaboration with Carolina Janning, have concocted for Lifetime an action film, a “Thèse-Mantra”* on a purple background, a twist-off manifesto with lots of special effects. Here's something to get us on our feet, in words and movements.

*Thèse-Mantra, Manifesto of Volmir Cordeiro, published in his book “Ex-Corpo”, Éditions Carnets du Centre National de la Danse (2019).

For Lifetime, Oona Doherty grabs the microphone for an improvised radio show where her buoyant voice, and sometimes teasing sense of humour, intertwine with a selection of songs that resonate with our state of confinement.

“I’ve put together a little chat and some tunes for Lafayette Anticipations and the Warm Up Session series in Paris.
Because I miss you all
With love
Oona”

Especially for Lifetime, Martine Syms tells us about loneliness through sound and images; inspired by the current situation, the artist transposes Cameron Awkward-Rich's text into a video, and invites us to consider on another way of looking at isolation.

“Thank god
the world has suddenly become untraversable----
I can’t go to the concert. The grocery store.
Can’t be in the company of people.
What could be a better gift?”

Through her choreographic and theatrical work, Ivana Müller revisits the places of the imagination by questioning the notion of "participation" and the potential of common sense.

Exclusively for the Lifetime project and during the entire period of lockdown, the artist proposes to experiment her film “Réflexions partagées” which adopts the playful concept of the incomplete text... a call to play alone or with the family to let one's spirit escape (and revise their French language foundations!)

After inviting parents to entertain their children creatively and poetically, David Horvitz is now imagining guidelines to create or activate conceptual art pieces at home. A new way to transform our everyday life by reappropriating our living space!

Piece 1
For one hour, exchange your breath with a house plant’s breath.

Piece 2
Read one sentence from every book in your house.

Piece 3
Make kitchen music.

Piece 4
Bring the outside inside.

For the "Lifetime" project, Théo Robine-Langlois presents the first three chapters of Don't forget your body in the bubble, a new series of sound and visual texts around the issue of the body in the suburbs.

The chapters, entitled Introduction of “Don't forget your body in the bubble”, “Creil-les-nails” & “Thiais-la-tongue” are available on our vimeo channel.

Hanne Lippard transformed her text Mistakes Made (2014) into a video piece for the project Lifetime.

It is about how time, economy and distance are used as a rational unified framework for our experience of the world, opposed to how these factors are actually experienced through the human body; less structured, less accurate, and above all, highly emotional.

'Solar power, is powerless. Solar hour is hourless.'

NTS radio's resident artist Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess shares with us, for the Lifetime project, a new unpublished sound piece in homage to the ancestors, in collaboration with Julien Creuzet for the voice and the texts.

Kiss & Tell uses field recordings and samples collected by the artist during her recent stay in Guadeloupe - her mother's native island to which she hadn't returned for 12 years.

In Christelle Oyiri's words: "Kiss & Tell makes different temporalities and different spaces coexist. It is an ode to hauntology where the ancestor becomes a benevolent ghost who is invited to live in the house of the present. It is to reconcile oneself with the idea of being in the presence of a ghost, whether living or dead. »

What becomes of our bodies in confinement, trapped between the attempt to keep up appearances and the desire to let go?

Choreographer Mercedes Dassy pools into her longstanding practice of yoga, fitness and meditation to develop a Warm Up Session in quarantine. Clad in costume elements of her "i-clit" performance, the artist is armed with her pop-feminist convictions and explosive gestures, to tackle our current reality.

The artist Rachel Rose gives us her confinement playlist especially for Lifetime.

Between the electro of Oneohtrix Point Never and the movie soundtrack of Jóhann Jóhannsson, a selection reflecting her iconoclast and eclectic artistic practice, to be discovered in her exhibtion as soon as we'll reopen.

Discover 10 playful and offbeat ideas to keep parents and children busy by David Horvitz for the Lifetime project. He offers us new perspectives on our surroundings in this time of lockdown.

1. On Familiarity of Place

In a place you are familiar with, a place you know as home, find something you are unfamiliar with, something that you had not noticed before. This could be your apartment, bedroom, street, etc... For example, you might discover the particularity of the ceiling corners of your bedroom.

2. On Water

Take a glass of water from the tap. Contemplate it. Look at it. Discuss and imagine its journey to get to you. And then imagine its future journey as it goes inside of you to become you.

3. On Measurement

In America they ask that you stay 6 feet apart. Discuss whose feet these are? Use your own feet to re-define what the foot is. With a string cut what your new 6 feet would look like. (You better not use this new measurement for social distancing!)

4. On Money.

Look around for a new kind of money. This could be acorns, rocks, leaves. Use it in your home.

5. On Time Zones

Discuss what a time zone is. Make different time zones for different rooms in your home.

6. On Distance and Faraway Places

Find the furthest away place you can see from your home. Maybe it's a tree on a hill outside your window. Now imagine a further away place that you cannot see. Maybe it's the Eiffel Tower or California. Learn the direction to this place from your home. Now point to it.

7. On the Moon

When the moon is visible, contemplate it in silence for a good length of time. Don’t discuss with each other what you thought. Keep it a secret.

8. On Letter Writing and Delivery
Sur l'écriture et la livraison d'une lettre

Write a letter to someone who you can walk to. Deliver them the letter.


9. On Story-telling and Movement

Read each page (or chapter) of a story in a different place in your home. Move through your home as you read through the story. If your house is small, even better!

10. On Seeds

Save all the seeds from the fruits and vegetables you eat. When you are outside scatter them around so that they might grow.

Surrounded by her machines (and supported by her canine companion of confinement), Kate NV offers us the privilege of this experimental pop live bedroom session specially made for our project Lifetime.

A real bubble of oxygen, and without doubt, a nod to her upcoming album "Room for the Moon" in June (RVNG intl).

The Warm-up Sessions regularly held at Lafayette Anticipations become an online warm-up adapted to confinement for Lifetime!

At the helm of this futuristic session, the multidisciplinary artist Jean-Biche :
"30 minutes of physical and mental preparation,
to integrate the artist's reality as much as possible,
and the challenges of its connectivity to the world."

Push the furniture away, increase the volume: it's time to stretch your limbs and your mind!

It is a great pleasure to present the work Amos' World made available exclusively for "Lifetime" during the lockdown period in Europe. This television series divided into three episodes centres around the life of the tenants of a allegorical networked building that was intended as an ideal of individual and collective architecture. Failing to fulfil its promises, this building appears inadequate, and its inhabitants slowly take back the control of their existence within it.

For our Lifetime series, Marianne Dobner, Curator at mumok - Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien has commented on this work with regard to the situation we are going through:
“ In times like these, Cécile B. Evans' work Amos’ World seems more present than ever. The interaction of isolation and community, the representation of power relations between individuals and the networks that control them become more and more a reality, but also the glimmer of hope to create something new from scratch seems more relevant than ever. ”

As well as Cecile B. Evans who delivers this message to us:
“The Amos' World series is usually viewed from individual spaces within a larger structure, a fictionalised setting to experience the films "alone together". We now find ourselves in that very predicament, under our own very specific circumstances. I have no advice to give other than to stay at home. This early moment feels right for processing, for feeling in general, and for reaching out to neighbors, family, and friends to see what they want or need. A time also to ask for what you need, so that together we can begin to redefine the terms and conditions we want to exist in the long term ahead.”

"Everyone / Together / Now / Yesterday / Always" are the words that Félicia Atkinson puts on her playlist INNER SUN, specially created for Lifetime.

Tracklist 01. LARAAJI - Change; 02. Low - Lullaby; 03. Alain Kremski - Musiques Rituelles pour Cloches et Gongs: Prières et méditation secrètes; 04. Pharoah - Sanders Colors; 05. Eli Keszler - Fashion of Echo; 06. Palace Music - How I enjoy the Light; 07. Tirzah - Affection; 08. Terry Riley - Songs for 10 voices and 2 prophets; 09. Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu Ledesma - And The Flowers have time for me; 10. Dominique A - Sous la neige; 11. Beverly Glen Copeland - Ever New

And to accompany the listening, Felicia Atkinson has selected a few books:

Don Dellilo, White Noise
Joan Didion, Play it as it Lays
John Cage, Journal
Anna Akhmatove, Poésie Complète
Sarah Magenheimer, Beige Poursuite
Emily Dickinson, Complete Poetry
JG Ballard, Vermillion Sands

Bendik Giske offers us a magical moment with this live performance specially imagined for our Lifetime project in the heart of the mythical Funkhaus Berlin.

Inspired as much by electronic music as by jazz, these 30 minutes of live offers a moment suspended in time.

The artist also suggests the reading of Ocean Vuong "On earth we're briefly gorgeous" to accompany this confinement as well as Susan Sontag, « Notes on a camp » ; Andrea Lawlor, « Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl » ; Maya Angelou, « I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ».