Scores of Matters
SCORES OF MATTERS is … … 100 things multiplied by the shadows they cast. … a document of a practice and its expansion. … a moving artist’s archive. … a network of reconstructed, hallucinatory, desired, asserted, proven, possible references and relations. … an exercise in going (astray) and (not) being able to find … again (and again and again). … lusciously inefficient and avowedly not user-unfriendly. … a virtual space inhabited by 100 and more material(itie)s, including humans. … a collection of plausible rumours and dubious documents. … a reality of possible worlds. … a game. … open-ended in principle…
SCORES OF MATTERS choreographs a game in and with the principles of my artistic practice without defining or fixing them. The user enters a densely populated ‘No-things-land’ of/from/in between 100 objects—everyday things, technical equipment, stuff. The things refuse to be ‘simply’ at hand. They flirt with the promise of functionality or practical use and at the same time resist, actively and passively. They constantly get in the way in a productive manner. This is precisely why they have been such important performing and co-choreographing partners in my work over the last 20 years. And this is why they are also the navigation system in SCORES OF MATTERS.
SCORES OF MATTERS has explosively exceeded the original scope of the invitation of the “Dynamic Archive” initiative (HFK Bremen & Schwankhalle Bremen) through its continuous proliferation and has now become an archive of its own. Nevertheless, the virtual building site you are currently in, is still a contribution to a growing online collection of artistic scores, as originally requested by the “Dynamic Archive”. SCORES OF MATTERS is a score in the form of an archive and an archive in the form of a score. It is a call to action and something to grapple with for everyone who moves within it. Links and connections zigzag along complex pathways through the obscure yet open terrain of a working method.
Objects are not static. They move. Mass, weight, materiality. Both literally and metaphorically. In SCORES OF MATTERS they appear together and in relation(s) as a hybrid ensemble of many voices. They answer to the question of how qualities, how the material motor or the conceptual motion of a mode of working can be documented, embodied and made accessible, with a chorus of opinions, insights, memories, inventions and hearsay from history books, instruction manuals and notebooks. They focus them like lenses and attract them like magnets. They pile up and knock one another over, forming alliances, interest groups and noise.
Artistic work cannot be personified. Eva Meyer-Keller is neither the subject nor the author of SCORES OF MATTERS and SCORES OF MATTERS is not a representation of the artistic work of Eva Meyer-Keller. This archive is filled and maintained by a large number of purposeful and involuntary contributors of ‘thingly’ and ‘non-thingly’ form whose presence has, consciously or unconsciously, moved and helped to shape something. Ultimately, ‘Eva Meyer-Keller’ is only just an assertion, a picnic bench somewhere in the terrain, the occasion but not the reason why the voices, memories, found objects, fictions—the materials you will encounter—are in contact without maybe having anything to do with one another. At least that’s what I think. But who I am—the artist herself or an artist friend, a flashlight, a cherry, an acclaimed philosopher or a pop song—you cannot know. Why should you?
Credits
IDEA, CONCEPT, TEXT & DEVELOPMENT
Eva Meyer-Keller, Ilya Noé, Emilia Schlosser, Constanze Schellow, Jules Urban
PHOTOGRAPHY
Eva Meyer-Keller, Adam Blaufarb
DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT
Liebermann Kiepe Reddemann
INITIATED BY
THE DYNAMIC ARCHIVE HfK Bremen, Prof. Andrea Sick , Irena Kukric & Schwankhalle Bremen, Pirkko Husemann
TRANSLATION
Daniel Belasco Rogers
THANKS TO
Sara Wendt
Venues
SCORES OF MATTERS, WEB, 2020
lecture performance with Eva Meyer-Keller, Ilya Noé and Emila Schlosser
12.12.2019