2018 Vol 1 Qtr 2 Wordactions

Traces of Language

Heike Fiedler is a quintessential poet of lila, a wordsmith of play. Watch her performances ‘I lost/imagine’ and ‘Pause/Pose’ here

The two clips featured on INTER-ACTIONS were created on 19 August 2018 at Fonderie Kugler in Geneva. The poems are from Heike’s book Langues de meehr, which is also available as eBook.

I lost Imagine

“I Lost, part of the corpus Sprachspuren (traces of language), is a good example to show the concrete implication of intermedial superposition of sound, text and image. At the heart of this text is an enumeration of things we may have already lost or we may lose. In times of migration, wars and other catastrophes, loss is the experience of so many people. The visual-cum-sonic background, constructed on the word imagine, is the English/French version of the German verb sich (etwas) vorstellen: ‘imagine losing, whatever’. If you utter the word imagine many times over and fast, you get the German word ‘Maschine’, meaning machine.”

Pause-Pose

“The title Pause-Pose is built on the word ‘superposition’ (not superstition!), which is my superposition of languages and of various devices that I use to perform. One of its words, ‘silence’, refers to John Cage, for whom silence did not exist, or to Henri Chopin, with whom I had gotten a chance to do a workshop in 2004. He conceived the body conceived the body as a fabric of sounds, a kind of noise-machine, acting even in a silent environment.”