Thief's Requiem Sketches

The Thief

By the Thief’s Requiem, I don't mean a Requiem for a Thief, but rather a Requiem by a Thief. The Thief is not Mozart nor I. It is the Project itself. The Thief's Requiem authors a theft by stealing itself away. It interrupts a habit of being by removing a lived expectation. This is the presence of absence.

A friend of mine once asked me what I fear. I said I feared stopping. She said I think you fear not being an artist. We were saying the same thing but her answer was infinitely more precise.

The question is who are we behind the story we constantly tell ourselves. Sometimes something has to be taken from us in order to find out. When removal occurs without gain to the remover and release occurs without loss to the individual, theft can become the greatest gift. This is the opposite of perpetration. It is something more like healing.

Discord often finds its duration in our tendency to cling to negative experiences. By indulging in our rectitude we fail to see our shortcomings. We place blame on something outside of ourselves and tell ourselves stories to evidence the blame. In this way we design our enemies. This tendency perpetuates a self-feeding cycle of point- counterpoint negativity from which few are able to emerge. Only through release can we overcome the riptide. Only through sacrifice can we find the turning point. Only through humility can we hit the reset button.

The point of the Thief’s Requiem is to bring people together in a common offering to one another. By providing the city and its inhabitants the opportunity to interrupt themselves, the Requiem removes, if only for an hour, a habit of separation. For that hour people tell themselves a shared story and listen to a shared soundtrack. They are lifted as if by a wave and brought back down in the same spot but they know it to no longer be the same.

One could argue, and honestly I agree that art cannot do all that this project asks. But maybe art can inspire it. Or maybe it’s high time art quits telling itself the story of being art. Ultimately, this project is just Brussels listening to Brussels and trying to tell Brussels what it hears.

Cardiac Defibrillator

people make the place.

thanks to daniel sharp for the images.

dream trains

I've recently made another move across town. Now cat-sitting at the edge of a bunch of railroad tracks. I would do anything to remember my dreams last night. All I know is that they changed with every train, like the trains were picking up old dreams and dropping off new ones.

Grandpa Schnapf

Limitation

a cuff's caress on a passing dress to say everything

a Lot of Moving

The Thief’s Requiem (now)

A Citywide Installation and Concert

"Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?" --John Cage

The truck passes by. Its sound penetrates walls and rattles windows. It finds its way down alleys and over gates becoming ever more faint with distance. But in the truck the sound is always present. It carves through and intermingles with myriad others. It joins with them and leaves. It and the others are replaced. These too will come and go.

In so far as I am a part of this world, its sounds are my sounds, a playground at recess, a wooden spoon stirring curry, a motor cycle hitting 90, a flock of pigeons, a couple’s argument, a closing gate. My moving carries with it a contingent soundtrack that will only ever fully exist for me. 6.6 Billion individual human soundtracks like the truck, rise and fade, carve and mingle, light up and disappear.

There is a Japanese concept called Mono no aware. It describes the bittersweet awareness of life’s impermanence. Bitter in its passing, sweet in its authenticity, life persists and its persistence is heart wrenching.

Thief’s Requiem begins in chance encounters. One hundred and fifty sites across Brussels act as points of impact. Each point utilizes sound to light modulators to absorb that location’s changing auditory landscape and transform it into light. Lights are floated as balloons and placed on rooftops so as to be widely visible across the skyline. From given points, several if not all the lights can be seen flickering across the city simultaneously.

For one week these installations interact with their neighborhoods, ephemeral monuments to ephemeral moments. They steal sounds from the street and release them as light. The week culminates in the unification of these otherwise disparate soundtracks in a final decomposing requiem.

An outdoor evening concert of Mozart’s Requiem is staged with a clear view of the skyline. A full orchestra and choir begin to play. As the work progresses church bells around the city ring one at a time. Each choreographed toll illuminates the fleet of lights. On stage, a musician stops playing, turns off their music lamp and remains uninvolved for the remainder of the concert. Likewise, one corresponding light no longer illuminates. In its place, a small group of phosphorescent balloons are released. This process continues throughout the performance eroding Mozart’s composition with each elemental loss. As sounds from the stage and lights on the skyline diminish the bells become more audible. Several balloons float above the city. They disappear one by one until at the end a lone soprano struggles to complete the Requiem.

As part of the Klara Festival, the concert will be broadcast live on Klara Radio. This will provide a unique format for experiencing the work from other perspectives and invite audience members to create their own viewing experience. Additionally several nodal viewing places will be organized throughout the city where people can watch the performance while listening to the amplified radio broadcast of the concert.

The Thief’s Requiem is created not only to be attended but also to be stumbled upon. As both an auditory and visual experience the work will be accessible throughout the city. Church bell chimes and glowing lights in the sky invite passersby to investigate and experience the work not as a performance but perhaps more intriguingly as a phenomenon.

As to me

As to me, as to now, only that I am at the very beginning again, a child remembering his young adulthood, especially the trees outside the windows, the clacking branches and the leaves twisted loose.

Here I am dependent, an infant. I can't even speak. The world behind me and the world in front of me rise like either side of a massive canyon.

Two me,
ripped from me
to me,
love you.
We go.
Too me
to stay.

two frowns
to pissing boy town

indicated by a resonance
located in a hollow
a place that cannot be entered
it's simple and sparse

and I get tired trying to reach it
I lose my place in the repetition of pace.
I stumble.

Dust plumes like powdered sugar
My tongue is chalked
I spit and cough

Fuck you!
It comes from deep within
and I’m not sure to whom it’s directed
Fuck You!

Because I will always trip

No revolution without revelation.
No relevance without resonance.

I’ve seen it before,
known from the start
lost it and lost it again.

A meteor travels across the sky
It illuminates the forest and terrorizes the animals
but all that it leaves behind is a crater in a field.

Wishes rise
harnessed around hearts
A sidewalk of strangers
walks lighter.

What They Say

Duration

"...the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence; to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically; the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening."

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
photograph: Farooq Naeem, Islamabad Car Bombing, NY Times