”Materials that pull” is a title that points to the possibility that materials have their own agency- that they can pull away and intertwine with other materials, immaterial as well as material.
Led by an interest to follow and stretch the materials that the field of dance has to offer, Köttinspektionen Dans has initiated a slow chain reaction where materials are linked to new materials. This is the second publication in a series of two; it concludes a two year project where series of choreographed reading circles have been documented by artists. The idea behind the choreographed reading circles, is a desire to challenge our relationship to text, and value how we read, in other words to make visible the choreography and movement of the reading (1).
Commissioning artistic documentations is a way for us to try out the concept of documentation from a strictly subjective horizon; an artistic horizon. A way to clear the concept from the idea of the objective, the neutral, the pure. Furthermore the publication aims to problematise the singular creative person, and investigate how they are connected with their surroundings, the surrounding materials: the ideas, the relations, the bodies, the objects- that embrace us all in constant movement. Materials that pull, that grab us, find us, connect, undress and perhaps even compost us all in an eternal cycle?
The artists that were invited to artistically document the reading circles, had the instruction to participate on the same conditions as other participants. Their commission was to respond to the event with their eyes, their ears, their hands or thought in a material that can be printed on paper.
”Materials that pull” consists of documentations of reading circles led by
Chloe Chignell, Caroline Byström, The Blob, Maria Stiernborg and Anna Bontha. The documentations are created by the artists Anna-Karin Brus, Caroline Byström, Marie Gavois, Munish Wadhia and Sophie Erlandsson, and the graphic design of the publication is by Jonas Williamsson.
(1) Text and reading is of particular relevance to the dance field, in relation to how the field has been undertheorised for a long time, and there has been a growing need for dance artists to give the dance/choreography theoretical weight, or to participate in contemporary art discourse- which demands text and language. Ironically, theory and text are often given superior status in relation to what is being done/danced; the reading as an action is disregarded on behalf of the content of the text. We tend to fall into a normative understanding of knowledge, placing language as the fundament of our knowledge production.