Take it, Bend it or Leave it: an Unbound Book and Zine

an Unbound Book

Irina Baldini

From signs on doors to silent codes, rules have influenced how we interact or propose ourselves in front of circumstances.

With the contributions of 13 artists, and the collaboration of artist-curators and documenters, this website presents a second life for the festival. It takes here the form of an Unbound Book or deck of cards for an on-paper tour of the event and this Zine or inventory, bridging the original artworks present at the festival with the photos taken to document moments in time and their interpretation, and guiding the reader through a game.

Mediated by these outputs, one's own journey is created through them, generating narratives or readings to keep engaging with and questioning rules, to Take them, Bend them, or Leave them to invent new ones.

How to play

This is a Zine in relation to an Unbound Book which is made of 78 cards/pages. It contain texts and images which are either the artworks on display at the festival, or moments documented during it and a small textual description to suggest and interpretation of the images.

The cards are made of 3 blocks:

-27 text (not in this zine but in the cards) -13 artwork images -38 images portraying moments during the festival

There are 3 suggested ways to encounter the content, but they are certainly not the only ones.

These options are given as ways to handle a rule the reader will choose, or the one the layout may present, and suggest relating to it through 3 possible approaches (as the festival title suggests):

Take it.

Bend it.

Leave it.

LAYOUTS

Layout #1 OPTION Decide a rule you want to engage with.

Take 2 decks: the one with text and the one with the images of an event.

Choose 3 images and 3 texts (6 pages). Lay them in couples.

1+2-how it has been to engage with this rule 3+4-how it is now to engage with the rule 5+6-how it can be to engage with it

Layout #2 FRICTION Decide a rule you want to engage with.

Take the 3 decks and choose 1 page/card from each. Lay them out next to each other: 1-artwork and rule it engages with 2-text 3-image of an event, and interpretation Interpret the 3 pages in relation to one another (use the Book, or your intuition)

Layout #3 DOUBT Decide a rule you want to engage with.

Take 2 decks: the one with the artworks and the one with the images of events.

Choose 1 of each. Lay then next to each other.

1-the artwork 2-the image of an event Interpret the 2 in relation to one another and the rule of your choice (use the Book, or your intuition)

NB: To pick cards from each of the three decks, keep them separate.

Things are not always what they look like. Or at times they are, but their use is not the right one for this occasion.

Portraying work by: Isabella Arboleda

If there is something missing here, it may be that it has already found its place somewhere else.

Portraying work by: Peim van der Sloot

An action that is performed where it does not normally belong, is simply another action.

Portraying work by: Isabella Arboleda

Does it say you cannot do it here, like this? And if it is said, who is saying it?

Portraying work by: Isabella Arboleda

While I’m Crossing is an audiovisual work motivated by the desire of questioning what femininity has been labeled as, by heteronomic context. It looks towards the ambiguity and the fluid nature that femininity can have, defending the individual and subjective experience of every woman. Ambiguity in gender is translated in this work, into the in-between spaces in the public sphere. These in-between spaces are seen as spaces that hold an undefined story such as transit zones, places under construction, abandoned, finally dissonant from normality.

Artist: Isabella Arboleda

You’d look funny if you’d tilt your head to read the notes that are written upside down. Do you want to make this effort, or do you want to make a different effort and see what happens when you stay with them upside down?

It is not empty because it is ugly. It is ugly because it is empty.

Portraying work by: Giovanna Chiara Pasini

Is there something you want to measure? Or is it just a matter of deciding quality or quantity, independent of the number?

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

Are you looking at the bread or at the pattern you can see through it? Think about what is obvious more than what is not, and choose on what to focus.

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

Hanging in there, pierced by a safety pin?

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

Any opportunity is an opportunity to play with what is given.

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

Things that have something in common are not necessarily one the copy of another. Nor is one necessarily the original one.

Portraying work by: Peim van der Sloot and Ella Tighe

Waiting for waiting. Waiting for change, or for the same as if it did not matter.

Portraying work by: Ella Tighe and Maria Pisiou

Do or do not. Or do and then change your mind. Then don’t.

What is stopping you from trying things out?

Portraying work by: all the artists at TBL

REPEAT is a durational work in which Ella attempts to REPEAT selected elements of the other performance works happening within Take it, Bend it or Leave it. The work will investigate what happens when the performer engages with surrendering into artistic propositions which have not been created by the performer herself. It will engage with varied modes of repetition and endurance as tools to embody and sustain the particular state of which the work demands.

This work is a live experiment.

Artist: Ella Tighe

Not all piles to carry are heavy nor will they last long in the shape they took.

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang and Ella Tighe

And what happens if you just step on a rule. Does it mean you are breaking it, or are you just taking a stand to see how it feels like, to then take that decision accordingly, and from close?

Portraying work by: all artists at TBL and Ella Tighe

Just a few stepping stones till you reach the top. Question is: what’s on the top? Can you finally rest there or is it more work than expected?

Portraying work by: Ella Tighe and Gustavo Tome Garcia

People from the past. People present in a memory. People from the future when you will touch them again.

Portraying work by: Eryfili Drakopoulou

Leaving things behind and facing forward. But without feeling bigger than the ancestors‌this way they can guard your back.

Portraying work by: Ella Tighe and Eryfili Drakopoulou

Retouching what was, to change what is. Is it an option to blend the two?

Portraying work by: Eryfili Drakopoulou

Me is an exploration of my identity within the women of my recent ancestry.

The photos depict women of my family tree, from my mother to my greatgrandmothers. You are invited to dig your finger in red ink and mark one photo of your choice. You can mess, alter, transform, reveal or erase my perception of these women thus the formation of me. I invite you to shake and reverse the core of this identity quest.

Artist: Eryfili Drakopoulou

Take a moment of tiredness as one of intimacy with the place it reveals itself.

Portraying work by: Gustavo Tome Garcia

There is no need to be shy or sorry for taking space.

Portraying work by: Gustavo Tome Garcia

There are places where you can hide, and other where it can’t be helped but to take center stage and rock it.

Portraying work by: Gustavo Tome Garcia

Is there someone looking at you, looking at me looking at you hiding something?

The work arose from a urgency to talk about the feeling of saudade, so complex, sad, desolate, frightening, immersive, almost deadly...

It is an attempt to relive a past full of beautiful things, intense moments and precisely that past that I miss.

The videos were all taken indoors. In quarantine, the only option is home-based, this intimate work talks about me, my past, my saudades and all the chaos that I carry.

Artist: Ana Luisa Brito Ribeiro

This piece is mostly about solitude, it's also about love. It's something like pulling my skin out so you can really see me. it´s an overwhelmed disinterested dance of a bodysculpure that can´t keep or hold its shapes together. it´s a wet dance, of bodily fluids, but now is also completely away. and on these screens there´s no volume and perception isn´t really the only friend you have.

Artist:

Lucas Koester & BRECHOCollectives

this thing keeps happening to me when i THINK I PRESSED THE CAPS LOCK button but i didn't.

Artist: Antrianna Moutoula

As if you were shaking your head as fast as your neck allowed, and suddenly you would be seeing multiples of what you have in front of you. Would you then make the same choice?

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

Looking for something. Looking until what is being looked for is lost and all that’s see is the space between findings.

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

What you see is what you think it is, just there is more to it than what you saw at first. Stay.

Portraying work by: Giovanna Chiara pasini.

As dark as a shadow can get, it won’t go anywhere. It will not become a black hole and swallow anything. A shadow is like friction: we are not standing nor moving without it.

Portraying work by: Ella Tighe

Would you know where things came from if you were told their story? No. You would know the story of where they came from.

Portraying work by: Eryfili Drakopoulou

Inspired by a poem composed instantly from social media sources in the period of quarantine in Athens, ‘Relationscapes, an exercise on waiting’ is a video dance performance where the values of instant composition are transformed into dramaturgical parameters and the state of waiting becomes a practice of listening and a condition for the coincidence to happen. The performer creates a context into which she makes decisions for the set of the space on the shooting time of the performance.

Artist: Maria Pisiou

I walk in a space co-habited by others without destination.

What/how is my pace? What is its agency? I invite you to walk with me and discover your own pace. Can we still walk together?

Rules are in place to safeguard to control to order our coexistence I engage with two rules NO RUNNING IN THE HALLWAYS KEEP 1.5 m DISTANCE While keeping my own pace. How is walking and running perceived in this case? What happens when a certain combination of rules and their interpretation creates stagnation? How would performer and spectators negotiate, deal with, overcome this stagnation?

Artist: Foivi Psevdou

In the face of any state of body or mind, hang right on your core center and dwell.

Portraying work by: Gustavo Tome Garcia

In relation to the theory of Byung Chul Han, in Burnout Society, we are “too dead to be alive and too alive to be dead�. This feeling of always being tired is consuming a lot of people that are struggling with anxiety and depression. There are several reasons for that, first of all, the capitalist system that always sells the image that only accepts in society a productive person.

We have to produce above everything. Social media also has a big influence in the way that we perform productivity and happiness.

Instagram was considered the worst social media for mental health. This small action is an experimentation of this theory and also a provocation of the question: Is it possible to be unproductive?

Artist: Gustavo Tome Garcia

Let the moment of doubt arise.

Portraying work by: Gustavo Tome Garcia

If you are expecting a decision -your own on someone else’s-, first take it. Then expect it to manifest.

Portraying work by: TBL and Gustavo Tome Garcia

Be idiot. Look stupid. Do it anyway. Then change your mind.

Portraying work by: all artists at TBL

You can also just take a mirror and look into it.

Portraying work by: TBL

The rule around here is a panorama of skeletons, the Calabrian ‘un-finished’.

People started to build houses, maybe while waiting their emigrated sons return maybe to move in a better residence, then the sons never came back and/or they finished the money. These monsters of disillusionment can be symbols of the failing economy and the progressive depopulation of whole regions. Often precarious structures, sharp, gutted, exposed, suspended, seeming been left mouth agape.

Artist: Giovanna Chiara Pasini

Inspired by D.Thomas ‘Under the milk wood’ (24h voices, dreams and thoughts, not bodies) and ‘Quite Early One Morning’ (the awakening of a little village in a winter dawn and the actions that make the inhabitants inhabitors), here is the attempt of configuring presences where absence reigns, creating a virtual occupation of skeletal places. But can the virtual one be considered presence?

This experiment would like to be just the start of a research about these issues and the potential use of such kind of places: is it possible to subvert the rule of their empty ugliness?

Could this phenomenon have an extra-regional/national appeal?

In any case, it’s necessary to deal with the place you belong to.

Artist: Giovanna Chiara Pasini

Rules are an arbitrary construct.

The Queen is allowed unrestricted movement across the board, the pawn a single square forward move. Themis blindfold let an eye appear as the imbalance is the fruit of a willful decision.

Artist: Digz

It’s an eight millimeter circular red sticker, available in packs of 540 for under one euro. But, this tiny dot answers the question that powers the art market: “Is that work sold?�

These red dots are a common sight, located on the walls of galleries and art fairs, to indicate that a work has already been sold. It has emerged in many forms and languages within my work, they have allowed me to question the value, commerciality, and collectivity of art. I encourage artists and arts organizations to attempt to create alternative micro-economies.

My propositions are about art, not as a luxury made possible by economic growth, but rather as a new way to set the terms on which exchange in the economy takes place.

Artist: Peim van der Sloot

At times the only tone of color to bring to a place is your own.

Portraying work by: Giovanna Chiara Pasini

The look of an eye that knows, and does not bother to tell is the look of an eye that trusts.

Portraying work by: Eryfili Drakopoulou

Just think! Why? And if why, then also why not?

Portraying work by: Cecilie Fang

What is the function of a chair? To be sat on. And how does it look? Typically a seat with four legs. We learn that one object has one specific function from growing up with certain societal norms. And we don’t question it. Instead, our brain's two-channeled system keeps recognizing these objects as having one specific function only. So what happens to the viewer when one specific-shaped object such as bread is suddenly put in alternative situations that are not seen as normatively correct?

Situations that our brain recognizes as 'wrong' and doesn't follow the rules.

Artist: Cecilie Fang

For all the stains on one’s history. Blood marks, red marks, accidental scars and inflicted wounds. Take them, bend them, or leave them if you may make a choice.

Portraying work by: Eryfili Drakopoulou

Irina Baldini, performer and choreographer, established 4bid Gallery in Amsterdam with three other artists, and currently runs it as a place of experimentation and site for the development of temporary-cultures across mediums.

She coinitiated the artistic program Highs & Lows, evening of performances in OT301 Amsterdam, bringing together international contemporary choreography and performance art. In 2016 she founded B.base, a program bringing the body as center and subject of events, in a hybrid form between visual and performative presentation. She is lead by an interest in openings, beginnings and believes in disposable formulas for one-time experiences. Her engagement in the recent years with La Biennale di Venezia has been decisive for her practice and her relationship to the group of dancers she currently works with. Irina is pursuing an MA in performance practices, is a maker, producer and teacher in dance and other art-forms.

She is author of the books Low Content, 2018, a collection of reflections around the notion of change through the lense of performance and Kelder, 2020, a photo-book rooted in the idea of inbetweenness and metamorphing. www.irinaosterberg.com www.4bidgallery.com

TBL 2020