Contain Contain

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

2 mins 50 secs

Contain Contain reenacts Parangol' Helium, a single-shot film experiment from H.O. (dir. Ivan Cardoso, 1979), featuring Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. The work includes a handmade parangolé, a costume or mobile sculpture that inspires an unexpected or situational body movement. The work is based in Ramallah, West Bank in the Palestinian Territories, and includes two collaborators: Samar Haddad King (choreographer) and Ramzy Natsheh (performer).

I'm interested in the reenactment and choreography of what was once spontaneous and improvisational, and the possibility of enabling a frictional relationship between live performance and recorded film. Oiticica performed in an improvisational format. I want to discover what happens when his movements and gestures are performed as gesture-for-gesture reenactment. With a detailed spatial map of each micro- and macro-motion in the original sequence, and after a series of rigorous rehearsals, the performer was invited to recreate it from muscle memory.

The supposed freedom and authenticity of an improvising subject is not taken for granted. Reenactment changes the alchemy of what it faithfully enacts, transforming both 'original' and 'copy' in the process. As the reenactment creates a simultaneous, one-to-one relationship to the reenacted (in shots, costumes, gestures, etc.), it also creates a proposition beyond the surface reality of the film. What is at stake in the remake of a work made under a 1970s Brazilian military regime in present-day occupied Palestine? What new emotive landscape can we conjure?

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Documentation

Images 1-5: detailed spatial mapping of movements, arms, and camera position for re-staging the performance.

Courtesy of the artist.

 

 

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Contain Contain, from the journal Dolce stil Criollo, issue 2, 2015.

Photo courtesy Hick Duarte.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Contain Contain, from the journal Dolce stil Criollo, issue 2, 2015.

Photo courtesy Hick Duarte.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Contain Contain, from the journal Dolce stil Criollo, issue 2, 2015.

Courtesy of the artist.

Selected Bibliography

Bahour, Sam. "Palestine's Economic Hallucination," Ma'an 2011.  

Byrne, Aisling. "Building a Police State in Palestine," Foreign Policy 2011.           

Dezeuze, Anna. "Tactile Dematerialization, Sensory Politics: Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés," Art Journal 63.2

(2004): 58-71.

Khalidi, Raja, and Sobhi Samour. "After Tunisia and Egypt: Palestinian Neoliberalism at the Cross-Roads,"

Jadaliyya 2011. 

Naylor, Hugh. "Ramallah Is Booming, but Residents Wait for the Bubble to Burst," The National 2012.  

Osthoff, Simone. "Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: A Legacy of Interactivity and Participation for a

Telematic Future," Leonardo 30.4 (1997): 279-289.

Rabie, Kareem. "Ramallah's Bubbles," Jadaliyya 2013.  

Schober, Anna. "Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés: Body-Events, Participation in the Anti-Doxa of the Avant-

Garde and Struggling Free from  It," theory at buffalo 9 (2004): 75-101.