(preview of 40min video) A parable at the end of nature. The Machine Stops is a speculative fiction about the end of the world with libretto adapted from novelist E. M. Forster and decor by architect Le Corbusier, shot in Chandigarh, India. In The Machine Stops two stories of the future collide. A story written in 1909 (The Machine Stops) and a utopian city constructed in 1960s post-partition India (Chandigarh) become a reflection on an imaginary opposition of designed world and nature. This design versus nature struggle is part of a contemporary sense of crisis about the survival of a human-made world. In E. M. Forster's humanist pessimism, resistance to the machine is a heroic venture where a cultured ideal of nature and the body is a coherent surround, or source, or comfort. In this new work, Forster's nostalgia for an arcadian state of nature (a kind of global-colonial fantasy) morphs into a contemporary conundrum where there is no longer an outside 'nature' to escape to, or a coherent 'body' to claim as primal. A single character walks restlessly through the interior and exterior spaces of an empty modernist landscape. A story comes to mind.
texte adapté de
The Machine Stops de E. M. Forster (1909)
Mis au point de Le Corbusier (1965)
enregistré à Chandigarh, Inde, 2017
performance de Fawas Ameer Hamsa
son de la machine - Nik Forrest
traduction et voix - Magali Stoll
voix de Le Corbusier - Ingrid Vallus
Extraits de The Machine Stops utilisés avec l’aimable autorisation de Peters Fraser & Dunlop au nom de la succession de E. M. Forster. Andrew Forster remercie Seema Gera, conservatrice adjointe au Government Museum and Art Gallery, à Chandigarh ainsi que l’office du tourisme de Chandigarh pour l’accès au complexe du Capitole. Il remercie également Monique Romeiko et Suzanne Miller pour leur soutien créatif à Chandigarh.
Paraguayan Sea street views (2017-2018 - ongoing installation). Paraguayan Sea / Mer paraguayenne is a text intervention in public space by Montreal visual artist Andrew Forster in collaboration with the Montreal poet Erín Moure. The yellow band of text wraps around the ground floor of Concordia University’s EV (Engineering and Visual Arts) Building, facing Ste-Catherine street and McKay street in downtown Montreal. This graphic and typographic public artwork in a mix of three languages—French, English and Guaraní—relays Moure’s poetic translation into Frenglish and Guaraní of the novela in Portunhol and Guaraní, Mar Paraguayo, by Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno. The font ('Iguana') is designed specifically for this project.
No Bottom (Boundless the Source) - 2023
a document by Andrew Forster
A long-time resident of Montreal, Malcolm Goldstein is widely recognized for his contribution to European and American experimental and improvised music since the 1960s. This includes collaborations with John Cage, Ornette Coleman and the Judson Church collective in New York. This video seeks to understand Goldstein’s unique definition of sound improvisation as he continues to experiment collaboratively through a series of new works composed for the ensemble Quatuor d'occasion (Nicolas Caloia, contrabass; Emilie Girard-Charest, cello; Jean René, viola; Malcolm Goldstein, violin).
Goldstein's "sounding" seems to have two parts. The first is a technique of play where the body and the instrument are a tool for the direct (or is it indirect?) exploration of the material universe through vibration or sound. The second is the score, the notations or 'map' which guides others to where and how the exploration should begin and how it should be modulated. In marine navigation sounding is the technique of dropping a weighted line to determine the depth of water. When the depth exceeds the length of line, when we are beyond the depth we can know, the call is "no bottom" - the title of this video-document. - Andrew F.
'Geste I' - installation with sound. (see also 'Geste II' for a simplifed version). This montage shows an excerpt with installation view and close-ups from different sections of the 20min video loop. In this installation version the two dancers are seen on separate projections with musician Malcolm Goldstein performing the sound component seen on a small monitor elsewhere in the space (lower left in this image).
This is an excerpt from a piece in which two dancers 'perform' a choreography without moving. The choreography is a 10 minute cycle. The choreography is a coordinated duet between the two dancers which is detailed and physically demanding. My interest is in the origin of thought in movement as spatio-temporal awareness. In this sense, thought, or consciousness, begins with our need to move, to retain a past and present in relation to space and time (a here, now and a there, then). 'Geste' inverses this formulation where the coordination of body, time and space is held in memory and reenacted without movement. The resulting clumsiness on the boundary between thought and action is the focus of the piece.
Video excerpts from recent or in-progress performance and video-performance pieces. "Montage" means short excerpts showing installation views. Newer things are first.
Video excerpts from recent or in-progress performance and video-performance pieces. "Montage" means short excerpts showing installation views. Newer things are first.
