ADRIAN GANEA & CHLORYS — MY BACTERIAL SELF HELPS ME SLEEP

VIDEO STATION — COMMISSIONED WORKS

Public speaking is regarded as an elusive domain, an abstract component of more tangible worlds, a vehicle leading both the speaker and the listener to the landscape of fact or fiction. The voice, the speech and the sound license experience, reflecting and influencing personal and social structure.

Six artists and their collaborators look into the mechanisms of speech, diving inwards through moving image practice. Ancient rhetorical training and the ecology of the non-human, insistent spirits of radio frequencies speaking about the past through lost dialects or speculative scenarios starting from contemporary social and psychological conditions. The four commissioned Video Station works approach public speaking phenomena and discursivity through a wide array of subjects, whispers, voices and gestures, as short fiction films, video art and hybrid docu-essays.

The artists and their proposals were selected from an international open call supporting the production of collaborative and transdisciplinary moving image works.

MY BACTERIAL SELF HELPS ME SLEEP, BY ADRIAN GANEA & CHLORYS, SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO, 2020

“With a particular interest in the ecology of the nonhuman, we propose a work that explores and studies shapeless masses, slippery sludges and slime structures. As these are often associated with decomposition, mere traces of residues, trails of verminous lifeforms, they actually provided the template for all organic beings and all eventual thought on the Planet Earth. Also, humanity’s gradual ascent comes from clustered pools of ooze – globs of swarming proto-life. 

Serving as a name for a life-generative formless substance in the physical sense, slime structures are greatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. However, these networks of slime are an important physical and metaphysical organism necessary for producing a realist bio-philosophy void of human exceptionalism/ anthropocentrism. The discourse thus turns towards/through this dark vitalistic substance of life, which is infiltrating pipelines, crawling through walls, seeping through floors. Perpetually present in the public sphere, the formless globs are accumulations of (non)life that inhabit the cracks, the edges and extremities. While detached from the public sphere, due to anthropocentric imperatives, the slime finds its way of articulating a discourse through its own properties. Voicing itself through itself, the slime may appear as disgust of life, decay, rot, unnerving spatiality of molds and fungus. 

Part post-apocalyptic sci-fi essay, part queer onthological stream of thought that is taking cues from intersectional science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s body of work and Paul B. Preciado’s juxtaposition with bacteria, this video tries to posit notions about nonhierarchical social formations and anti-capitalist thinking.” (text by Adrian Ganea & Chlorys)

CREDITS

Voices: Cosima Opârtan, Patrick Brăila 
Voice processing help: Dan Anghelache
Commissioned in the frame of Quote—Unquote: Video Station

BIO

ADRIAN GANEA is drawn to the unreal, intrigued by the magic of the intangible and the ethereal, he seeks the sorcery that incarnates the virtual into solid matter. He is fascinated by the ways the bodiless nonmaterial subject can materialise and transpire into the real world. In his work, he aims to enact the production of fiction, often reflecting on its increasing automation. His practice ranges from designing scenography to programming CG simulations and composing videos. He graduated at UDK Berlin, receiving a masters degree in Set Design in the class of Hartmut Meyer with his project “Cyborgia” based on Paul B. Preciado’s essay: “How Pompeii invented Pornography, The “Gabinetto Segreto” and the Sexopolitical Foundations of the Modern European Metropolis”. He briefly studied architecture, and is a member of the artists group virtuellestheater.

CHLORYS is a musical & visual entity, part of Queer Night family, Shape Platform artist in 2017, and since 2016 until present, a founding member of Corp. platform, with a main focus on representing and promoting queer identities (trans, nonbinary etc.). She has been a Noods Radio resident for two years, hosting Alien Flora, a show inspired by the traveling of seeds or spores making their way through space, with the final purpose of laying on the fertile and inconspicuous soil of Terra. As a direct quote from the sci-fi horror movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, she tries to evoke an esoteric atmosphere, incarnated in vocal musical works that blend with ambient, 1990s aesthetics and beyond.