Friday, January 5, 2024 at 7:30pm
Boredom Loop: An Evening with farO
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Presented by Alexandre Estrela
Located in a space adjoining the 18th-century parish church of Santa Isabel Campo de Ourique, and overseen by Ana Baliza and Alexandre Estrela, Lisbon’s farO is one of Europe’s most distinctive cinema venues. “The program is extremely slow,” Baliza and Estrela have offered, “as the selection of the pieces screened is made with the overall idea of an exquisite corpse.” In practice, this has meant a winding concatenation of artists featured since 2007—from Michel Auder to Ana Jotta to Ben Patterson to Jane Veeder to Franz Zwartjes—through events that embrace a variety of themes, structures, and running times.
At Light Industry, farO presents Boredom Loop, a game-like program built around chance operations and obsessive recurrence. As the curators explain, the screening consists of “eight short pieces that we love and have haunted us for years, silently growing in our minds a profound aphasia that renders us almost unable to talk about them.” Each has been assigned a letter, from A to H; their order of appearance shall be determined by randomly consulting a page of a specially-designed book, which will also help select one title to play repeatedly between all the others. “We think, yet we're not sure, that the interspersed experience of the same video or film replicates the comfort of bodily phenomena, like the artist Öyvind Fahlström says: ‘repetition is intimately connected to the body’s own cadences, such as breathing, blood circulation and ejaculation.’ The recognition of what is already familiar might well produce the innate pleasure in boredom.”
The variables will include:
A)
Copper Giloth
With audio by Mimi Shevitz
As I Said, 1980
ZGrass animation, color, sound, 7'
B)
Ernest Gusella
Connecticut Papoose, 1981 (excerpt)
Analog video, color, sound, 4' 28''
C)
Miguel Soares
Jumping Nauman, 2007
Google-earth animation, color, sound, 6' 17''
D)
Catherine Biocca
Solitaire, 2015
Digital animation, color, sound, 1' 37''
E)
David Askevold
Rubber Band, 1971
S8mm film transferred to video, color, sound, 3' 27''
F)
Amy Lockhart
Pee, 2013
Amiga animation, color, sound, 38''
G)
Animal Charm
AMS Sphincter 800, 1990s
Analog video, color, sound, 2' 16''
H)
Bill Etra and Louise Ledeen
Grumbles, mid-1970s
Rutt-Etra animation, color, sound, 38''
Tickets: Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
Above: Sigmar Polke, Boredom Loop (Langeweileschleife), 1969.
PS: This is your last chance to catch Estrela's Flat Bells at MoMA.