When antennas convert love in space. AETHER9 Beirut. Lebanon

english post

Aether9 performance this time was in the frame of the Beirut Street Festival, as always, our performance was visible both online and on location (in Beirut: in the famous Hamra Street).

Here is a rehersal video from the desktop screen.

This time, we didn’t adapt a previously know text or myth or tale, we have work on a specific script for Beirut.
The live sound was performed in Beirut, featuring Joe Elias
playing oud and the voice of Samir Youssef.

Æther9 @ Hamra Street, Beirut
Date: Sunday September 28th 2008
Time: 8:30 PM CET
Location: Hamra street, on the outdoor screen of el medina theater.
<!–Title: When antennas convert love in space
–> Participants:
Laure Deselys, Samir Youssef, Joe Elias, Zoe Judell ( Beirut )
Judy Nylon ( New york )
Manuel Schmalstieg ( Geneva )
Boris Kish ( Brussels )
Audrey Samson ( Rotterdam )
Paula Vélez Bravo ( Medellin )
Christiaan Cruz ( Los Angeles )

The script was bassed in a text writed in Beirut for this session. Here it is:

«We will try to tell you what’s in our hearts, we will try to transform this energy of human being into other energies, sound energy, visual energy, and hopefully energy of scent. Let us send things from here to there, everything, let us send the East through this unlimited ether, leave the laws, the fact of ‘ existing borders ‘  and meet elsewhere.
We have never had the feeling that we exist in a located place, it s not even a location, although my dear friend started to mention cities’ names since I met her. We have never had the feeling that we wanted to reserve a specified location in this chronology of love, this chronology of passing by, of vanishing in. But here we are today, we decided for some reason to choose a place, a place to meet our eyes, our embraces. For some reason we have chosen the roof of a building, and you people of earth, locate it, wherever you want, wherever you are.
The place is sexy enough, curiosity will come out of your mouth, and you will speak, it will come out of your eyes to contemplate the sea, exists this sea or not, you will light up your cigarette upon the roof, adult you are or boy who’s seeing how much more there’s water in the tank-water to tell his mom, you will light it up and fly with its smoke in the air until you get the point of hearing languages you don’t understand, you will light it up to think deeply of a solution for the coming few days. The place is really beautiful, because people are living under your feet, and you don’t know if this feeling is a mixture of good and evil
inside of you. But don’t drink too much, just to avoid falling down. We have already drank too much and fell down.

We fell down and we found some history in our flying skin; the idea that we live and interact for a limited time crossed our minds. We fell down and we couldn’t see but embodied stories in the Aluminum sticks, stories of antennas that exist in huge number upon the roof of small Beirut, stories that are still there though the disappearing of their technology and replacing it with another one, that are still there though their crowdy shapes and their noses that go higher to the sky. We found also some memories in the sitting rooms and in between family’s members, we found a division of kisses walking straightly just like a Persian division, like a line of ants which is entering the apartment through the metal cable, a straight line of ants that’s bringing Silver Santa’s gifts. Silver Santa, who refused to keep for himself some of these gifts because of the main condition of physics.

Here we are today, we love to stay together upon the roof, alone with these thin things, to stay and to try talking to them or about them; they say rain falls down, so does the deer of holly Christmas, and if you wanted to see the moon, its rays will visit you from up there. Here we are today, we look at silent communities, silent although their massive quantity, we look at a glooming society which didn’t hide a secret, which didn’t say a word about its secrets.

During the previous years, it was enough for you to see toward what direction antennas were fixed to find out the programs that are being watched by the families. Then, here we are today, we wonder what do these things look like. Do they look like the pieces of rail-ways in Beirut? Or like the white line that the transporter ship traced it in the sea? Do they look like the white old buses of the bus station? Will they go back to transmit and work again?

We don’t know, but somehow, we feel them strongly, and we are lucky, lucky because we can visit them or visit their locations, that’s what you cannot do anymore in many cities of U.S.A or Europe after the crisis of 11 September 2001, we visit them as if we are visiting something that we possessed for a long time, just to feel their shadows, these forests of flying birds in the countries of migrant wind.

We will catch up the train of development. But let us know well that there’s some real common in between this dialogue in here and other dialogues around the planet. Speak the Korean language honey, speak the spanish, I cannot remember anymore the difference and the pictures, speak and know that from the ether to the antenna to the television to the eye, there is an upside-down stairs that gods wander it continuously; But let us know also that we feel respectful and thankful to the recent fact of useless antennas.
Respectfulness and thankfulness to him for mooring the old ways of love in the only harbor of human being».

Aether9. Beirut-Medellin. Pasaporte

If this video do not appear here , just click in this flickr link.

Here a letter writted to Laure working in Beirut :

Laure:
Hi!
Script looks pretty good, i like the idea of the enveloppe, and of
love anthenas.
Here in Medellin there are not so much antenas as i can imagine they
are in Beirut. But i can tell you somme of my ideas about the contexte
I live and the associations I can make about Beirut – MEdellin – Love
and anthenas.

For a while in Medellin, in the 80’s and 90’s here, the media, people
and around we used to hear a comparation betwen Medellin and Beirut.
Everywhere we hear about which one of those cities where more violent.
They sayd that in Medellin they where more violence than in Beirut
even if Beirut was in a war. Also MEdelllin had her own war. And all
was around drugs, «cartel de MEdellin», «cartel de cali» , the Mafia,
the bombs, the «sicarios» (tueurs à gages or killers), well, is
interesting because I can say that Medellin and Beirut are sisters and
brothers finally. We have already lived also a live in between life
and death, arms, bombs, sadness, desorder, we still in a sort of way
more silent than before and than it could be now in Beirut.

In those decades also the big parabolic antenas star to be the last
mode in Medellin, specially in Mafiosos houses. Because it was
expensive and the MAfiosos where the ones that could have big, very
big parabolic anthenas. Then it became more normal, but later they
desapear to left place to the little ones.
Those anthenas use to be in roofs, but they dont make part of the
typical landscape because they are not specially visible like in Beirut.

Well, I live in a 11th floor building in the uper floor, so i think i
can manage to use my internet connection from the roof. It is not
super simple but manageable. Also , if i dont find anthenas, i can make
a sort of, with metal , and things… of built a sort of parabolic
with aluminium paper….. i don’t know, lets figure it out, I ‘m just
trying to star my feedback with some ideas the script evoque me.
(sorry about my english)

Welll, let’s see tomorrow if we can talk in skype or something… It
is hard in this moment for me back in Medellin after moving a lot this
summer and not finding very clear what I will do for work now this
days…. so I have been a bit far from the aether, at the same time I
have been in the aether completly, It was hard even for me to find
where could I be.

Well, see you soon in the net.

Paula