Luiz Zanotello
Variantology of Distance
If "poetry is the shortest distance between two humans" (Ferlinghetti), then the ways in which technology tends to flatten time and space raise a question of intimacy beyond the poetic and the human. In this study, I seek to develop a kind of media practice that accounts for, rather than excludes, both. I argue that to sense and engage with the spatial complexities posed by the post-digital and post-colonial conditions, a transversal poetics between intimate, social, and environmental ecologies is needed.
The research departs from my own experience as a mourner, a migrant, and an artist as starting points to look at each ecology. Poetic distance is taken as a perspective to investigate the crossings among them. By means of a spatial variation of distance, performative and installation-based situations are created to articulate these positions. At each variation, site-specific media practices are developed as means of generating new insights. Through this process, 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. How is meaning shaped by poetic distance? How might insights move through 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.