The film documents the process by which eight students from the Cygnus Gymnasium high-school in Amsterdam make contact with material from Robaard’s archive. In the beginning we see selected pages from the archive arranged on the ground in a two-dimensional plane. Gradually this flat horizontality is disrupted, as the bodies navigating the space begin to isolate images and hold them up vertically for interpretation, while reciting excerpts from one of two texts that were selected by Robaard – Vilém Flusser’s Our Images, which explores the ways in which we read images and texts, or Plato’s The Statesman, in which weaving is proposed as a metaphor for the construction of a stable society. Through this process of selection, recitation and response, the material becomes rearranged and new relations are animated across its surface. (text by Amelia Groom published at the occasion of If I Can’t Dance Edition VI Performance Days, dec.2016)
