COMMUNICATION CAPTURES (extracts and elements)

APA (A Performance Affair), The Second Edition: re: production, Vanderborght Building, Brussels, Belgium

2019

The body’s sensory ability to “think its way into” space as well as into other bodies, materials, substances and matter is an important aspect of Stella Geppert’ work which is connected to essential sculptural and choreographic questions. “Breathing” for example is an important sculptural material for modelling the space. Coal for example is part of the human metabolism, part of the chemistry of the human body. Carbon dioxide, coal, metal, oil (silicone) are materials of the industrial age. In COMMUNICATION CAPTURES they are used for sensory dialogue studies and for the construction of social space.

Stella Geppert considers herself as a kind of communications sculptor and understands sculpture as a “relational investigation” into verbal and nonverbal bodily communication. Her recent performance COMMUNICATION CAPTURES deals with a kind of “archaeology of bodily presence.” As an Attempt to Capture Communicative Presence, the performance initiates an affective space and forms the contingent fabric of social-communicative processes.

The scope of action for the performance is established by the constructivist-seeming sculpture HIEROGLYPH CEILING. As a walk-in space, the sculpture is a data collector for fleeting and incidental movements that are transferred from the involved actors via head antennae to the respective borders of the space via seismographic graphic traces. Analogue HEADSETS – pipes attached to the heads with a piece of charcoal at the end – act as tactile communication organs. They draw paths into the air, connect visually with the delicate metal rods of the sculpture and create a surrealistic overall picture of a network of interpersonal relationships in space through somnambulistic scratch contact.

COMMUNICATION CAPTURES also stands for a transformation of communicative activity into a sculptural form. For Stella Geppert drawings are imprints and thus a sculptural form of embodies language or ÉCRITURE CORPORELLE. The resulting “abrasions” extract communication and are impressions and forms of expression of a spatial action, an unconscious, physically executed image. Form, action and reception are one. The “head drawings” form a CO2 PRINT, an individual signature of practised cultural and physical techniques.

COMMUNICATION CAPTURES shows what is a fundamental part of human existence: Surrounded by (technical) tools, we are never just an organic and natural body, but always in contact and exchange with materials, implements, other people, technologies and spaces that, as extensions of our own bodies, influence our movements, communication and actions. (Stella Geppert 2019)