丁香园AV

Artist Statement: Pas de rendez-vous

My recent work, moving from a background in theatre to a more interdisciplinary practice, frequently explores the ways in which repetition structures relationships. In these drawings, I explore film (and cinema more broadly) as a space in which we inhabit by means of mapping the moving image through our attention. In 2013, I set out to adapt Chantal Akerman鈥檚 1978 film, Les rendez-vous d鈥橝nna, into a stage play. The film explores a filmmaker鈥檚 various disconnected rendezvous with family, friends, lovers, and strangers while travelling from Germany to Belgium, and finally France. In 2015, after Akerman鈥檚 death, I started to work on the film again, this time with a black marker on a piece of foam core and tracing parts of the film鈥檚 projected images as they passed.

These four drawings are presented alongside the film鈥檚 soundtrack to create another form of cinematic experience, one that emerges from my own navigations of Akerman鈥檚 images and their sounds. I understand this act of navigation within the context of the concept of territory as articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A territory, for them, is something in process. It is constructed through the repetitive assembling of components. And while a territory has a provisional, 鈥榝rame鈥�, its shape changes over time. The navigation that makes up Pas de rendez-vous constitutes a (re)territorialization of a territory in motion through my own spectatorship. The work is a copy that recognizes the variation and difference that every repetition depends upon and it seeks to affirm the play that makes all 鈥榗opying鈥� possible.

Put another way, by tracing the film, I make visible a second 鈥榝ilm鈥�, another possible cinema, one with a relationship to Akerman鈥檚 film that is made possible by a disconnected rendezvous鈥攂etween spectator and image, between student and mentor.

Bio

Patrick Blenkarn is a Canadian artist. His artistic projects are predominately, but not necessarily, performance-based鈥攁nd they frequently emerge from his thinking (and writing) about theatre, philosophy, and cinema. He is interested in subjects as diverse as repetition, pedagogy, labour, digital performance, and multilingualism. His theories on political theatre have been published in Theatre Research in Canada and he has also presented other writings at international conferences, including the Derrida Today Conference in 2014. Patrick has a degree from the University of King鈥檚 College in Halifax, Nova Scotia and is currently completing his Masters of Fine Art in Interdisciplinary Studies at 丁香园AV in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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