BLUEPRINT | SEISM

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Last year the initial stages of Bennett’s city-mapping research and Kaparis’ research involving intimate processing of traumatic experiences in the brain (‘mental shapes’) were presented at Gallery Maurits van de Laar. Now, the ‘unwrapped’ sequel to this unique duo project is shown at GEMAK; ambitious, layered and experimental. The artists will both engage in a dialogue with the GEMAK space, search for mutual connections in their work and interact with musicians, who will react to the artistic work through improvisation.

The exhibition will be opened on Friday 13 March. During the opening there will be performances (starting at 6:30 pm) by the Amsterdam based MAZE-ensemble, with an improvisation on Bennett’s animation/visual score in motion BLUEPRINT, and singer/sound-artist Marie Guilleray and cellist Semay Wu, with a piece based on the Kaparis’ installation SEISM.

About Justin Bennett’s work in GEMAK:

Central to Justin Bennett’s presentation is the film project-in-progress Blueprint. Blueprint, made in close collaboration with a number of improvising musicians, combines hand-drawn animated city-maps and stenciled texts with a live soundtrack. (The first version of the music will be performed by the MAZE ensemble at the opening and will be recorded so that it can be heard for the duration of the exhibition. Another version will be performed at the finissage) Blueprint asks questions to the musicians and the audience about the links between social, urban and musical structures. The context of Blueprint is widened by the inclusion of two older works. City of Progress is another animation, this time accompanied by a spoken text which touches on the roles of architects, developers, artists and the military in urban planning. Stimmung is a sound installation documenting the intervention of the audience during a Karlheinz Stockhausen concert at the Holland Festival of 1969. We hear the music being interrupted as the audience “join in” with the musicians. The concert is stopped but then a discussion starts over music, politics and audience participation. Around these three audio-visual pieces, Bennett shows a selection of sketches and related source material for Blueprint and the other works.

About Pascale-Sophie Kaparis’ work in GEMAK:

With sensitive precision, Pascale-Sophie Kaparis draws organic versions of structures that develop in our brains. In her ‘mental shapes’ drawings, she shows how the information (Kaparis often takes the traumatic experiences of others as her point of departure) that we receive through our eyes is processed by the brain. The red lines she draws are partially covered again by correcting fluid, creating a layered image of information that remains present, but is not clearly visible or (more) difficult to access, possibly because of the suppression of (traumatic) memories of a certain event. The things that the eyes were forced to see and subsequently processed by the brain, is recorded and archived in Kaparis’ drawings.
Just like Justin Bennett’s BLUEPRINT process, the drawings/installations in the SEISM series form a layered score for an audio work.

SEISM, the umbrella title of Kaparis’ contribution to this collaboration, refers to seismic activity, such as earthquakes, and is used by her as a metaphor for the violent transitions that occur when what is seen and recorded by the eye subsequently finds its way in our brains.

BLUEPRINT | SEISM is a project of GEMAK in collaboration with Maurits van de Laar Gallery.