
Points of Contact (2019)
Durational performance and video work

Points of Contact documents a performative negotiation between the dense scrub on the hillsides outside of Sellasia, Greece, and the artist--each marking and defining the body of the other. Lesick repeatedly throws his body through the density of vegetation, slowly exposing a pathway in the same way the forest cuts and scars his flesh.
There is an inherent conflict to existence. We at once seek to define a determinate identity that can only exist in relation to others who both affirm and deny us. We desperately want to exist in our own right and we desperately want to disappear into otherness. The question of mattering is thus one of simultaneous creation and dissolution. For Nietzsche it is the balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the construction of the determinate and its fragmentation into the indeterminate. When we stray off this fine line of self/other too far into the self the indeterminate reasserts itself in violence.
Points of Contact thinks through issues of entanglement, co-constitution, mattering, and identity, and the implications of quantum physics on philosophy, as part of Lesick's research into fundamental ontology and theories of Being. Here theory moves into the physical world as a form of praxis exploring, synthesising, and building on the ideas of the likes of Jean Luc Nancy, Karen Barad, Catherine Malabou, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The project also opens a dialogue on the intersections of nature and culture, human being and environment, self and other.
The piece openly considers the processes through which things come to matter, marks are made, meanings are necessitated and deployed, and the encounters that define both us and others become archived in physical, mental, and emotional forms and landscapes. Shot by Michael Higgins, Points of Contact combines slow-motion video with intervals of silence and spoken word offering an open exploration of the dialectical processes through which things come to be in the world.
Produced at the Koumaria Residency 2019, Sellasia, Greece.
Jordan Edge
Dasha Ilina
Robert Jedrzejewski
Tunni Kraus
Joshua Legallienne
Kurtis Lesick
Marili Pizarro
Georges Salameh
Nour Sokhon
Małgorzata Suś
Special thanks to:
Medeaelectronique
Vicky Bisbiki
Kleopatra Korai
Eric Lewis
Yannis Lolis
Manolis Manousakis
Eve Nakou
&
Michael Higgins
The 2019 Koumaria residency is organised in partnership with the Onassis Cultural Centre Athens (OCC) in the framework of the INTERFACES project, an international, interdisciplinary project focusing on bringing new music to an extensive range of new audiences. With the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, Interfaces unites nine diverse partners from the UK, Germany, France, Cyprus, Belgium, Romania, Austria and Greece with main objective to explore innovative ways of introducing audiences to the work of cutting-edge musicians and sound artists and engage new audiences of all ages to the music of our time.
www.interfacesnetwork.eu



