School of Verticality is an ongoing field research about listening and learning from embodied, situated forms of knowing. Which forgotten nurturing practices can we bring to light and reinvent, together? Where on earth do we belong? Each episode interweaves various biographies (human, animal, territorial) and temporalities (of geology, history, biology, dreams, memory).
For its fourth episode so far, School of Verticality explored the potential of weaving borders by reinventing Allan Kaprow’s happening OVERTIME (1969). The one-night mobile assembly, co-activated with Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro, enabled a conversation on different forms of knowing related to land. The end of the happening was decided by the group.
One year later, on May 25, 2020, Krier and Verlet-Bottéro sent each participant a unique copy of a series of 31 postcards, consisting of a random assembly of photographs of the environment of the happening and short transcriptions of the words exchanged by the participants. Images and citations were paired randomly.
For us, the activation of OVERTIME at Villanders-Villandro functions as an original methodology of affabulation that is neither empowered nor stabilised by writing. The deterritorialisation of the happening, its activation on this Alto Adige mountain pasture, allows the emergence of a new poetic form that questions the way in which one equips oneself with narrative materials to approach a territory and its transformations.
“What is the nature of the multi-voice testimony generated by the happening? How to restore a memory that is more than human, corporal, plural? While the happening sought to develop a singular form of narration and attention to the networks of relational agency of a mountain, our restitution work will focus on the fragmented memory of that night. In the continuation of the exercises of transmedia devices that we have developed, we will experiment, among other things, with audiovisual arrangement processes guided by randomness (Cage 1961) and artificial intelligence as a source of writing allowing a side step from anthropocentric narratives.” – Bottéro & Krier 2020
Performative walk and film projection
In 2022, Lungomare and artists Sophie Krier & Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro went back to screen a film based on their reinvention of the 1968 happening in San Diego (US) on Villanderer Alm–Alpe di Villandro. Between documentation and poetic speculation, the film weaves footage from the happening, interviews with participants and local experts, and atmospheric audio materials composed by the artist-filmmaker Carlos Casas. Three years after the happening, the 13-minute video installation was brought back to the Villanderer Alm–Alpe di Villandro. It was shared with the local community in an ephemeral Bergwerk-Kino, a cinema-in-a-mine. The performative screening reflected on happening as community, entangled scales of space and time, and complex relations between labour, extraction and capitalism in South Tyrol.
Photos 2022 screening: Elisa Capellari, Lungomare.
Initially developed with Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro in the context of a research residency with cultural association Lungomare, Bolzano. Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate. Iterations with support from IA engineer Aris Tritas and EnsadLab PSL Université Paris Sciences & Lettres, group Reflective Interaction, track Experimental Publicizations (.able). Camera & sound Carlos Casas. Graphic design by Inedition.
