September 2010
1 post
July 2010
107 posts
An Interview with Marcos Lutyens (The Hypnotic...
LW: I was wondering about the place of The Hypnotic Show on Repetition Island. I understand that hypnosis works through techniques of verbal repetition and also that a lot of people attended quite a few of the shows - so in that way there was this kind of short-term and long-term repetitive hypnosis going on. Regarding this what effect do you think that the format of Repetition Island had, that...
John Menick:
Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, Experimental Psychologist and “Psychic Explorer”, Dies at 99 Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, an experimental psychologist who studied the dream life of the Yanomami and wrote the best-selling book Repetitions, died Tuesday at his home in North Haven, Conn. He was 99. His family did not give a cause of death, but according to articles published by Mr. Mardisen, in recent...
Sarah Robayo Sheridan:
The man had been told that he needed a travel document in order to leave and return. After many months wait, the appointment notice arrived. The last digit of his postal code had been blurred and, and, as a result, on receiving the notice it was already overdue. He would have to obtain a new appointment. The notice contained no return address but in fine print on the bottom of the page a telephone...
Will Holder:
(Maybe she saw me first.) We passed – she and I – and rather than walk on, I stopped to see what had made her smile that made me stop: the paths, bordered by the cobbles where they met the embankment – hugged in place by a waterlogged bulge of roots – above ground, nor piped straight back up by bark, but in the mean of directions water will go of its own accord (with the help of gravity) – in a...
Ruth Robbins:
Yesterday, Mardi was insatiable. First, there were the strawberries stacked on the corner. She could have devoured the red flats. And after the fruit? Mardi eyes the peonies and the woman selling them. Now, she is perched on the stool, feet dangling in the bare room. There is only the stool, table, floorboards, lamp. And there is the cake iced pink. She remembers her hunger from yesterday. Here...
Benjamin Seror:
The day it was decided to call “Mardi” the closing day. He was always late. So late. It was sometimes hard to work with him. For exhibition, he was always one day late. Maybe it was in fact one week and a day late or one month and a day late or even one year and a day late but the result was at the end he always have a day late. On opening days, shows were always empty and full the day...
Hugo Hopping:
Mardi possessed a valid and real transcendence of the alienated world of man. In response to the intellectual harassments of others, who failed to comprehend the internal progression of the self, Mardi deflected attacks with compassion and patience, and then, when called for, with wry wit and idiosyncratic irony. This is due to Mardi’s deep understanding of the abundant forms of mediocrity and...
Paul Elliman:
Mardi’s life is said to be characterized by repetition but it still involves patterns of change, since repetition also follows a range of tempos. Take the birds, for example. Every morning the same birds occupy the same places and sing the same songs. The male Indigo Bunting, a small bright blue finch-like bird that could fit comfortably inside the gently closed palm of a small hand, will...
Aaron Schuster:
There was a proposal to ban Mondays. It passed, overwhelmingly. Mondays are terrible days, nothing good ever happens on a Monday, even old ladies of the sort who carry large plastic bags and pick at knots in their hair agreed that they would be measurably better off without the Monday. The campaign for “The Reform of the Living Week” was a success. Monday disemboweled himself in a fit of despair....
Vivian Rehberg:
Mardi Goodnight stood at the gilt mirror, studying her reflection and bracing herself for another evening on Repetition Island. She adjusted her tasteful jade silk gown, clipped back her gleaming waves of burnt copper hair, applied a slash of coral lipstick, and emptied her face of all emotion. Tonight, of all nights, she could show no visible trace of regret for taking up with Dr. Snow. She had...
Romas Zabarauskas:
It started when I noticed a girl with red hair and anachronistic post-punk look in a bird shop after Hitchcock’s cameo (I always watch Hitchcock after bad sex). I thought I saw the note “Marnie” on her T-shirt, so I decided to watch a film of that very same name to solve this strange secret. This time I saw the redhead girl in a corridor of a hotel and I realized the note on her T-shirt...
Jean-Christophe Fregnan:
Some time ago, on an occasion lost to memory, Mardi read an old caravanner’s chronicle that recorded the details of a daily regimen recommended by a long-dead sect of ascetics, and later favored by warrior shahs who sought special clarity when deliberating on great matters of state. The regimen consisted of a cold bath each morning (by preference in a mountain stream, far removed from the...
Ellen LeBlond-Schrader:
Between kicks, the wood pigeons biff and body check until, with a stifled coo, they tumble through the window left ajar. Wings jab the linen curtain, bodies soon sheathed in fibers, feathers brush over nubs. She waits for a sound, but hears nothing. She can only see the muddled forms. It must be quieter than the aerial sounds of ravens and eagles, but at least as loud as a paperbound book. A...
Sarah Rifky:
His sister scowled at him “250.000 Euros! Just say that’s what you want!” He hesitated for a moment, he didn’t want to lose the job by requesting an unusually high sum for a cultural worker, he thought. “Fuck it.” 250.000 Euros. Click. Send. He didn’t want to hold up his sister’s drinking party downstairs. The next morning, Mardi was offered the job of his dreams. That same morning, Mardi...
Francis Mckee:
Day Sleeper. That’s what the sign on the door said. It meant Mardi worked nights. Slept days, worked nights. The sun goes down and she enters El Cerrito. The sun comes up and she’s back in her room, the secret place of the stairs, the green bed, cedar beams, the roar of the passing trucks on the highway outside. When all was said and done there was nothing new under the California sun. Beckett...
Dodie Bellamy:
Mardi is a suspense sex mystery. She stops before a poster stapled to the trunk of a palm tree. It reads: Each of us is born with a share of the family jewels. Everyone except Mardi, she thinks. She dresses in a blonde French twist and a tropical-green suit. Her satin girdle swishes against the tropical-green gabardine of her pencil skirt. This is the image she’s going for, contained, repressed....
Fabien Giraud:
John Lock hunts boars. boars get killed. maybe later, out of the frame, they get eaten. that we don’t see. some don’t get killed. frightened and frightening they escape. they run out of the frame. these boars, running and escaping, are not eaten. they go in the forest. at least we presume they do. at least we know they go out of the frame. where they go that we don’t see. later,...
Olivier Babin:
Maxine Kopsa:
Maybe this is the only way to sit down and write about Mardi: on the balcony of an overpriced villa overlooking the sea, with your own pool and deck chairs, naked. The tiles of this pool are not soft, they don’t let your feet glide over them, covered by just the right amount of slime, these tiles are worn, the glaze is off most. It doesn’t hurt, it just feels tired. If I look ahead of me, my...
Pedro Barateiro:
Mardi is a dancer. He was born on Repetition Island. He grew up without his parents, as it often happens in this island. He was raised in a community with 29 other children of different ages. He’s tall and keeps is hair long. Mardi is the last interpreter of a specific ritualistic dance created in Repetition Island some 180 years ago. An older woman was his teacher, or his companion, as he...
Tommy Hogg:
Mardi had had enough. She quit. She quit yesterday too. But today was too much. The shake machine wasn’t working. She ran out of ketchup, and now someone’s broken the toilet seat. She didn’t want to quit. But running this McDonald’s on her own is just too much. She thought that if she got up early enough she could plan for everything. She diced the onions, thawed the meat, even counted out change...
Sarah Demeuse:
“Mardi,” you say, “like Mardi Gras. You know: New Orleans, Rio, Samba….” You want to add Bakhtin, and a critique of meat-centric religiosity but you don’t. The clerk looks at you, fills in the FIRST NAME blank. And continues: “Color of Eyes? Hair?” You have brown eyes and dark brown hair that is slightly thinning, despite the wonder shampoos that line the rim of your bathtub. When you had a...
Liv Barrett:
Spray the same perfume to clothes or the pulses of a body, everyday, and eventually the scent will no longer register. Repetition is a performance of love, eventually it erodes its object. A movie is an island: it is aware of the world beyond its edge, but the edge is always visible. The opening sequence of Mister Lonely follows a Michael Jackson impersonator on a small motorbike around a...
Dina Danish:
Ding-dong. Door opens.
Receptionist: What’s your name?
Mardi’s sister (shouting): MARDI! She’s asking you ‘what’s your name’.
Mardi: Oh, it’s Mardi.
Sitting. Waiting. Two pale, middle-aged women are also waiting. One calls the other auntie.
Woman: I’ve been poisoned by needles.
Auntie (Nodding, seemingly shocked face)
Woman: It’s a bad country,...
An interview with Bernard Blistene
LW: How many times have you been to the Island?
BM: I have come everyday.
LW: And how would you describe the evolution of the project over the week?
BM: I didn’t come at the same time every day so I didn’t feel the same. But I like this idea of repetition. I like this idea of coming back – like an obligation or a necessity. I do believe in Marcel Duchamp’s definition of a works of art. He said...
“I’m a three digit number. My middle digit is five more than my first and...”
– Enigma de Luc Kheradmand
An interview with Ieva Miseviciute and Michael...
LW: Could you describe your performance?
MP: It is the complete history of Obdurance Art from 1860 until the present.
LW: Do you want to give a few highlights of that history, for the folks at home?
MP: One of the most known pieces of Obdurance Art happened in 1935 with Louisa Edgar and Beth Schemmel. It is called Yellow on Yellow and it is the first Obdurance opera. It happened in Vienna. Most...
An interview with Morten Norbye Halvorsen
MNH: I am recording. I am recording all of today – the whole day - and then I record the next day and the next day and the next day. When I start recording the days before start playing back at the same time. All the differences, gaps and changes in the script will maybe make it into more of a melody.
By the end all of the awkward pauses, strange overlaps, like when five days play on top of...
WatchFeeding time on the island
Warren Pierce:
Mardi awoke exactly the same time she always woke up - five minutes before the alarm. Early bird, her parents used to call her. She showered, had a coffee, and by the time she left her house the acid rain had stopped. The subterranean pod was jammed with humans and aliens - all going to their subterranean station. The biomorph agent at Repetition Island - her own station - punched her in two...
An interview with Benjamin Seror
LW: I wanted to ask you how you come up with the stories that you tell everyday at Repetition Island.
BS: The stories change a bit everyday. At first it was improvised and I did know exactly what I was doing. I decided after the first day. I planned to change the story, but I thought it would be interesting if it had the same structure everyday but with different works. But it is always about...
Mario Garcia Torres:
Mardi did not own herself. She was of the type that followed. She tumbled from one place to the next, from one situation to the other with no reluctance. Her life drove her from being a friend’s companion to be a neighbor’s helper, to be an accidental witness of a ghost-writer. Mardi occupied an erratic life and sometimes she managed to inhabit more than one role at the same time. One could say,...
An interview with Mont Analogue - Piersandra Di...
SM: We received an invitation and it was quite a surprise invitation for us. Raimundas invited Mont Analogue (www.montanalogue.org) because he saw our publication in Rome, and this was the beginning of the dialogue. We received this invitation when the project was already defined and the idea of repetition was already there. The blog was open and the dialogue with the artists and between the...
“Forward I’m heavy but backwards I’m not. What am I?”
– enigma de Luc Kheradmand
