channaboon - Tumblr blog

channaboon · 1 year ago

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'H' is a swimming pool that is shaped in the form of the letter 'H' and, like the T-Bar, is based on the idea that a letter carries meaning and that the origin of language is the (human) body. The sound of the letter 'H' is actually 'breath', and in Hebrew it means the soul or breath of life that is present in everything and everyone. 2022, Helicopter The Hague, The Netherlands. Read more here.

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channaboon · 4 years ago

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T- BAR, Performance for UNPLUGGED #4

'T- BAR, Performance for UNPLUGGED# 4 at Helicopter artist’s run space in The Hague. written and performed by Channa Boon, September 19th, 2020. 'By ordering and drinking your consumption from the T-Bar you maybe thought you were doing nothing special except sustaining our artist’s collective while having a good time. Nothing exceptional. Not any of this is true..

The letter T derives from the ancient cross form, which has, in Phoenician, Babylonian and ancient semitic cultures been the symbol used as a mark, a stamp, a seal, and used as an autograph by people that couldn’t write, as is still in custom till today.

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channaboon · 4 years ago

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La Pizia e la Marangona / The Python and the Marangona

duration: 40' Future Rhythms, collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale 'All the World's Futures', 2015, S.a.L.E. DOCKS, Venice.

A lecture performance in collaboration with Alberto Peratoner, the last bell-ringer of a line of families since the Renaissance that lived, worked and maintained the mechanics and clocks in the torre dell’Orologio at the St. Marc’s square in Venice. I created this work for the Venice Biennale and its theme is the appropriation of the female body by various empires over time. In the work this is brought forward through a lyrical narration that is sung by the antique sculpture ‘La Pizia’, which is embodied by the singer Juliane Dennertt. She interrupts the Academic lecture that Peratoner is giving on the topic of the role of the body throughout times. For this occasion, she left her position, high at the column (she is the ‘dragon’ at the feet of San Teodoro) overlooking the square and positioned right in front of the tower where Peratoner once was born and lived. She accounts of her journey through time and the world; stolen by various rulers (of which the last were the Venetians in Constantinople) and shipped to Venice. The lecture performance is an interweaving of a real and a fictional story. The cosmopolitan sculpture community standing at San Marco square is the reflection of many centuries of plunder. In Venetian dialect La Pizia emotionally sings her version of and vision on this story. The sculpture and her-story have literally become acoustic.

I wrote the libretto during a residency at Fondazione Giorgio Cini. A big thank you to the other collaborators in this work: composer Arnold Marinissen, singer Juliane Dennertt, Professor Thomas Schweigert, Mike Watson and S.a.L.E. DOCKS (Magazzini del Sale, Venice).