What are the rhetorics of the Song Mountain area in relation to attention?
How can they be observed?
What is the area producing?
How is the choreo/geography of the region like? How does it look, sound like? What’s its rhythm, set-up, constellation?
(Choreo/geography can be understood as the mutual inscription of all the elements involved in a certain setting.)
What are the performative gestures, tactics, patterns, and narration encountered on the spot?
And how does this all relate to me? An example of an encounter.
How about the rhetoric of the constructed piece?
I approached the spot in a eco/cosmological way. The elements used, the video, the audio, the text, the voice, the cuts are very much presented in an autonomous, disjointed way. There is not a persona or a voice in the work that presents itself as the central focus. The final constellation however is very much constructed and very rhetorical. The constellation or arrangement is set up to emerge eventually and is then perceived as a suggestive proposition, a quiet intention or a gentle manipulation.
The editing was done like a musical score and adding black was the main tool used for the video editing. This reflects my eco/cosmological approach: everything is already there and thus the narration becomes visible by filtering and elimination.
In shooting and editing an inverse focus was used. The interest is not only in who is on stage but also in whom or what brought them there. This is the relation that rhetorics have with attention.
There are movement patterns in the training scenes that seem redundant, they hardly ever work towards a climax, everyday choreography is shown alongside practiced fight moves etc. There is a lot of standing, waiting, dreaming, watching, talking...
By researching the mining sites, industrial sites, construction sites often was found out that they were inseparable from training sites.
Listening to the Taoist monk we learn that his rhetorical scheme is based on correlative logic a typical Chinese cosmological paradigm. Everything is related and in a state of circulation.
The shaping of reality by the audience guided by the elements proposed by me gave the following result: the large-scale uniform training of the martial art schools can look like a monoculture seen from a westerner perspective. Situated in a communist background it can even evoke a suppressed sense of fascist overbearing. It shows a mythical shaping of a people by their land and by their mountain.
What do we recognize and what not? The shaping of reality continues in the audience and his perception.
Some find the arguments and sentences of the Taoist monk silly or absurd. Others find him such a lovely character and the kind of man they would like to meet if they would go to China. These qualifications are part of the individual/collective shaping of reality of the audience and are not given by the choreo/geographic surface of the Song Mountain area.
My constellation however serves this natural tendency to construct reality by proposing suggestive elements.
Observing and registrating the choreo/geographic surface of the Song Mountain area shows that my encounter was just a small facet of the eco/cosmological realm belonging to the spot. The local perspectives were used to shape the piece.
The Song Mountain area was presented to me as being in a state of circulation. The material flows from the periphery to the centre and from the centre to the periphery. The piece itself is set up following this logic.
audio video piece - single screen - 37:17 by Fanny Zaman
top
