RADICANTS, PARIS: Selin Davasse, “Unlace my Syntax”, April 15, 2023, 7 PM
In “Unlace my Syntax” Selin Davasse slips into the role of the Tamada, a rhetorically adept and alcoholically well-versed master of ceremonies ociating at Georgian banqueting tables. She transplants the sociopolitical space of the banquet to Pickle Bar, conjuring an interaction ritual revolving around the speech genre of toasting and the communal musicking modes in Georgian polyphonic singing. Mimicking but also menacing public speech customs rooted in masculine self-mastery, she salutes all unbounded, porous and shapeshi!ing bodies by welcoming contamination. Interpreting the banquet as an academy where unocial narratives are celebrated and the Tamada as a wandering agent of mythopoetic transmission, she raises her glass to knowledge that is sung, not archived.
Concept, Text, Performance: Selin Davasse
Custom Suit: Situationist
Hair Design: Henriette Theurgarten
Musical Arrangements: Dorothee Barall
Leaflet Design: Ozan Şanal (Studio Abo)
Leaflet Photography: Joseph Kadow
Custom Nails: Camilla Inge Volbert
Jewelry: Räthel&Wolf
Make-up: Agatha Couture
Selin Davasse (b. 1992, Turkey) lives and works in Berlin. Her research-based performance practice repurposes disparate literary and performative techniques to engage with ethics and politics from alternative presents and speculative futures. Composed of narrative and sonic textures, her work condenses systems of thought into intimate feminine expressions; and takes shape as spoken-and-sung performances with participatory, playful, and parodic layers forming heterogeneous hospitable relations with the audience.
RADICANTS, PARIS: Nikolay Karabinovych, “Opalima Kupina. 101 Years forward with Zdanevich”, 22 April, 2023, 6pm
Opalima Kupina. 101 Years forward with Zdanevich. is a lecture-performance by Nikolay Karabinovych with elements of buffonada*. In 1922, after his transit through the Ottoman Empire, the Tbilisi born futurist poet Ilia Zdanevich emigrated to Paris where he performed his Zaum* texts in various café surrounded by the Eastern Europe and Caucasus diasporas. By recounting the texts with surprised slapstick while invoking a music history to map the poet’s displacements, the lecture offers to revive the cabaret-like aesthetic of Zdanevich’s performances. Doing so, Karabinovych describes a potential transnational history of Paris émigrés and uncommon historical parallel following Zdanevich assertive critique of the intelligentsia of old Empires. After all, the Tatlin Tower is the hypertrophied leg of the Eiffel Tower.
* Buffonada is the Ukrainian word for “Slapstick”: a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy.
* Zaum are linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation coined by Cubo-Futurist poets. It is a non-referential phonetic entity with its own ontology. It’s organized through phonetic analogy and rhythm.
Nikolay Karabinovych (Odesa, 1988) is an artist from Ukraine, currently based in Antwerp, who works across various media such as video installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. He explores the social histories of Eastern Europe, approaching collective and personal memory by means of analytical, conceptual or interventionist tactics.
