Luiz Zanotello
Variantology of Distance
At the center of this research is a question of poetic distance. If “poetry is the shortest distance between two humans” (Ferlinghetti), then the way technology tends to flatten time and space threatens not only the poetic, but also the very possibility of relation. In this study, I seek to develop a kind of transmedia practice that challenges this tendency. I argue that to sense and engage with the spatial complexities posed by post-digital and post-colonial conditions, a transversal poetics between intimate, social, and environmental ecologies is needed.
The starting point of this research is my own experience as a mourner, a migrant, and a media artist as perspectives to investigate each of the three ecologies. By means of a methodological variation of spatial distance, I create process-based installations, texts and performative readings to articulate these positions and their crossings. At each variation, I develop site-specific media practices as a means of generating new questions and insights. Through these processes, I explore methods of moving across and beyond (trans-) media and space, nature and culture, intimacy and distance.
A Variantology of Distance, therefore, examines the epistemic space of transmedia art practice. It does so by tracing the crossings between intimate, social, and environmental ecologies from a situated perspective. In this context, it asks: how is meaning shaped by the binding of poetic and spatial distance? How might transmedia practices generate insights across its ecological registers? What ethical and aesthetic implications emerge in doing so?
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Research funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick at the University of the Arts Bremen (DE) and Prof. Dr. Anke Haarmann at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (Leiden University and Royal Academy of Art, NL). It was initiated under the title “The work of abyss and time” in October 2021.