organised in collaboration with Tlön Projects
Two Voices by Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain
09.12.2022 – 11.12.2022
Curated by: Chris Bestebreurtje and Petra Kuipers
Actors: Annabelle Hinam and Thor Louwerens
Opening Times: Friday to Saturday 13:00—17:00
Sunday 10:00—11:00
Performance Times:
09.12.2022 17:00
10.12.2022 14:00 and 17:00
11.12.2022 11:00
A ticket for attending a performance is required.
You can book a ticket here: tlonprojects.stager.nl/web/tickets
For the past two decades, the Brazilian artistic duo Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain have been working on a coherent oeuvre which poetically translates various linguistic, scientific and meteorological findings. At Tlön Projects’ behest, they will now, for the first time, present a performance with a comprehensive staging environment which brings together various connected works. The presentation will constitute a framework within Tlön Projects’ Satellite Programme and its annual cooperation with ROZENSTRAAT – a rose is a rose is a rose in Amsterdam.
Two Voices (2012) expresses the cyclical relationship of the sun and moon. The presentation’s titular piece is a black & white animation projected onto the opposing eastern and western walls. Sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset. One day per minute. 365 minutes equal a year. At the bottom of each projection days, hours and minutes indicate the passing of time at the artwork’s accelerated rate.
From 365 days to 365 minutes, the quotidian variations, evolutions and interactions of the rhythms of sun and moon, day and night are accelerated so as to reveal to audiences the fragments of a pas de deux that usually escapes our inattentive eyes.
30 minutes of this work — the lunar month of December — constitute the score for two actors who will put the solar-lunar dialogue into words by reading excerpts discussing one or the other. The lecture’s duration is determined by the heavenly bodies’ cycles. As these are asynchronous, there are moments at which the actors read aloud alone, moments of vocal overlay and moments of silence.
Both preceding and after the performance, the animation Two Voices will alternate with two black & white animations: 28 Lunes (2014) and 365 Soles (2016). The first shows 28 excerpts from the astronomical tract Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo Galilei from 1610 which reveals the moon’s various phases. 365 Soles is 28 Lunes’ counterpart. ‘Sol’ — Latin for sun — is situated in the centre of a disc constituted by 365 pages from the book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus that was first published in 1543. The words on the pages meld and change 365 times while the word ‘sol’ remains visible at all times.
A new series of textual pieces from the ongoing project Palavras Compostas which started in 2012 will be spread out across the space. The artistic duo will also exhibit three large prints: textual excerpts from the performance with the duration of one day transferred to a sheet of Kozo Awagani paper. Featuring characters instead of minutes, as in the animation Two Voices.
Finally, another work on show is a new piece from the series Vanitas (2017 – present day) which features words that reference the passing of time written using a notational system in which every letter of the alphabet is indicated by a particular number of flowers in a vase. Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain used the word ‘cycle’ that is spelled the same way in both English and French as their point of departure and as a meta commentary on the entirety of their works.
