The Weight of the Tongue is a sound program that is presented in the framework of The Weight of the Concrete by Ezio Gribaudo. It explores the vocalization of experimental and concrete poetry. The program gathers the voices of Katalin Ladik, Tomaso Binga, CAConrad, Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Nat Marcus, Bryana Fritz, Hanne Lippard, and Patrizia Vicinelli. Their contributions will be accessible throughout the exhibition.
The program serves as a speculative prelude to an upcoming publication The Weight of the Concrete (2024), which reflects the editorial premise of Il Peso del Concreto (1968), that featured Gribaudo’s early graphic work alongside an anthology of concrete poetry edited by the poet Adriano Spatola. The 2024 publication revisits and reimagines this publication and the archive of its making, pairing Gribaudo’s graphic work with a new selection of historic and contemporary concrete and experimental poetry.
Katalin Ladik, Nat Marcus and Bryana Fritz will perform their contributions at the opening of The Weight of the Concrete on December 7, 2023, at 19:00.
Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Six Pages from Concordance, 2022. 01:00:00
Katalin Ladik, Lullaby, 1977, recorded in 2016. 02:11
Katalin Ladik, Psalm, 1977, recorded in 2016. 01:08
Katalin Ladik, Song for oiled stove tube and female voice, 1977, recorded in 2016. 01:29
CAConrad, LLTGBR 1, 2023. 00:33
CAConrad, LLTGBR 2, 2023. 00:37
Bryana Fritz, Lingua Ignota, 2023. 6:32
Tomaso Binga, SognOgnor, 1999. 3:25
Nat Marcus, Let Me Roll It, 2023. 4:37
Patrizia Vicinelli, Poesia fonetica da Fondamenti dell’essere, 1985-87, recorded at Radio Città del Capo, Bologna, 1988. 01:12
Hanne Lippard, Work, 2020. 01:10
Susan Howe (b. 1937, United States) and David Grubbs (b. 1967, United States) have been collaborating since 2003. From their latest album collaboration, Concordance (Blue Chopsticks, 2021), they created a 60-minute sound installation titled Six Pages from Concordance. This installation was featured at the 2022 group exhibition Drum Listens to Heart, curated by Anthony Huberman, at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.
Susan Howe is an American artist, poet, and writer. Howe’s poetry evolved from her painting and drawing career. Closely associated with the late 1970s and 1980s Language Poets’ movement, Susan Howe’s poetry and scholarship are most accurately characterized as language-based and experimental. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Concordance (Paperback, 2020), Debths (New Directions, 2017), That This (New Directions, 2010) among many others. She is also the author of The Gorgeous Nothings ―Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 2013) and books of criticism such as The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993) and My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985).
David Grubbs is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe, visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and choreographer Jonah Bokaer. His work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with the Red Krayola, Will Old- ham, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and Loren Connors, and many others. He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMB Magazine, a member of the Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.
Katalin Ladik (b. 1942, Serbia) lives and works in Budapest. From her background in poetry and theater in the early 1960s to the present day, Ladik has employed multiple formats in her work such as performance, sound art, collage, drawing mail art and photography, while also often drawing on the multicultural and multi-ethnic environments of her native Eastern Europe. Yet throughout this broad range of artistic expression, Ladik’s work is at all times grounded in poetry, whether poetry as text, or poetry in a more expanded sense, such as concrete and visual poetry, musical poetry and poetic performance. Her most recent exhibition, Ooooooooo-pus, is a retrospective collaboratively organized by Haus der Kunst in Munich (2023), Ludwig Forum in Aachen (2023), and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2024).
CAConrad (b. 1966, United States) has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by the artist Augusto Cascales.
Bryana Fritz (b. 1989, United States) is a choreographer, dancer, and writer. She works at the intersection between poetry and performance often in duet with the user interface of OS X. Her work is fed by a continued interest in medieval literature, fanfiction, media studies, and histories of illiteracy. She also collaborates with Henry Andersen under the moniker Slow Reading Club. As a performer, Fritz worked with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Xavier le Roy, Boris Charmatz, Michiel Vandevelde, and Femke Gyselinck.
Tomaso Binga (b. 1931, Italy) has been a vital figure in Rome’s avant-garde art community since 1970. Tomaso Binga—a pseudonym chosen to critique gender-based cultural privileges—has been developing her work across performance, collage, video art, sonic poetry, and painting. Her work distinctively merges various elements – from writing to gestures and images – often exploring the boundaries of meaning. She has participated in exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Festival International d’Art Vivant in Lyon, Quadriennale of Rome, and the J. Klemm Foundation in Buenos Aires. In 2024, she will have a solo exhibition at the Museo Madre, Naples. Recently, she has also participated in exhibitions at La Galerie Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noisy le Sec (2023); Mimosa House, London (2019); La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2017); Accademia d’Ungheria e Casa delle Letterature, Rome; Sala Santa Rita, Rome (2014); Museo Madre, Naples (2013); and Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2013).
Nat Marcus (b. 1993, United States) is a poet, designer, DJ, and co-editor of TABLOID Press, a publishing house and media imprint founded in Berlin in 2014. Her poetry, art criticism, and lyric journalism have recently appeared in Arts of the Working Class, The Ransom Note, and Edit. Marcus has participated in poetry readings and performances in venues such as KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Haus am Waldsee (Berlin), and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen). In the last years, she has also exhibited at SYSTEMA (Marseille), Kunstverein München (Munich), Mint (Stockholm), and Felix Gaudlitz (Vienna). She holds a residency at the Berlin-based radio station Refuge Worldwide, and as a vocalist has collaborated with Ulla Straus, exael, Perila, and Soho Rezanejad. Aside from the collections of silkscreened clothing Marcus designs and releases under the TABLOID imprint, she has produced graphics for numerous record labels and collectives including Uzuri, West Mineral Ltd., 3XL, Ediciones Capablanca, and Morph.
Patrizia Vicinelli (1943-1991, Italy) played a pivotal role in Italy’s artistic and political activism scenes. As an influential figure in the underground movement, she was an active member of Gruppo 63, a neo-avant-garde literary group. Her engagement with artists and poets such as Emilio Villa, Adriano Spatola, and Aldo Braibanti was a testament to her influential connections. Additionally, Vicinelli’s interactions with figures in the Italian experimental cinema of the 1970s, such as Alberto Grifi and Gianni Castagnoli, underscored her diverse and impactful contributions to the Italian cultural sphere.
Hanne Lippard (b. 1984, United Kingdom) primarily explores the voice as an artistic medium. Her training in graphic design underscores her interest in the visual and social forces of language. More than merely informative, her texts are visual, rhythmic, and performative. Within the lineage of the great figures of feminism, her work interrogates the emancipation and social alienation of the word in our hyper-connected age. She has received the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2024, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (upcoming 2024). Her most recent performances and exhibitions include The Myths and Realities of Achieving Financial Independence, CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, Berlin (2022); Le langage est une peau, FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2021); Contact, Mood, Share at MHKA, Antwerp (2021); RIBOCA2, Riga (2020); ART 4 ALL, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020); and Our present, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2020), amongst others.
In Tongues is a sound program that accompanies appendage, the solo exhibition by Iris Touliatou. Activated in the office spaces of the Grazer Kunstverein, the audio program challenges the usual function of this “oral space.” The oral contributions by artists including Alison Knowles, Eduardo Costa, Eleni Poulou, Hannah Weiner, and Lutz Bacher thwart the space that usually hosts oral negotiation, transaction, communication, and exchange and turn it into a site where institutional language gets infused with the poetry of a bird singing, a spy spying, or a speed racer passing by.
The program will be activated every Saturday throughout the exhibition period.
Eduardo Costa
Eduardo Costa Chats With The Birds I, 2014, Audio, 1:26
Eduardo Costa Chats With The Birds II, 2014, Audio, 4:45
Eduardo Costa Chats With The Birds III, 2014, Audio, 6:22
Courtesy of the artist.
Eleni Poulou
Attunement and the white telephone, 2022, Audio, 8:50
Courtesy of the artist.
Alison Knowles
California Sandals, 1991, from Frijoles Canyon, written by Alison Knowles & Joshua Selman, performed by Alison Knowles, originally released in 1992 on CD & cassette by Nonsequitur Foundation/¿What Next?, Audio, 4:59
Copyright Alison Knowles & Joshua Selman. Courtesy of Alison Knowles.
Hannah Weiner
Three Poems, 1969, from Tape Poems, ed. Eduardo Costa and John Perreault, 1969.
Poem 2: The Problem, Audio, 0:29
Poem 3: Helium and Krypton, Audio, 1:06
Poem 4, Part 1: The Sound of an Object in One-Dimensional Motion Along a Line from A to B, Audio, 0:41
Poem 4, Part 2: The Sound of an Object in One-Dimensional Motion Along a Line from B to C, Audio, 0:42
Poem 4, Part 3: The Sound of an Object in One-Dimensional Motion Along a Line from C to D, Audio, 0:39
Poem 4, Part 5: Speed Racer, Audio, 1:00
Courtesy of Eduardo Costa, and Charles Bernstein for Hannah Weiner in trust.
Lutz Bacher
The Sea. Spies Like Us, 2012–2013, Audio, 18:02
Courtesy of The Estate of Lutz Bacher and Galerie Buchholz.
Eduardo Costa (b. 1940, Buenos Aires) works and lives in Buenos Aires. He lived 25 years in the United States, where he collaborated with Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, Dan Graham, John Perreault, Marjorie Strider, and Hannah Weiner. In Brazil, he was part of Helio Oiticica’s group which included Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Antonio Manuel, and others from the school of Rio. Costa’s work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; amongst others.
Eleni Poulou has been making music for over 30 years with different musicians in various music formats, including The Fall, Lee Scratch Perry, Shizuo, and currently with NOHE NOSHE, Kaffe Mathews, The Caretaker/James Leyland Kirby, Zsolt Sores, Hilary Jeffery, Wolfgang Seidel, Burkhard Beins, Moon Gear, Andre Vida, Recycling Plastic Inevitable, and many other friends and colleagues. She has several monthly radio shows on Cashmere Radio and Movement Athens, among others. Poulou works and lives in Berlin.
Alison Knowles (b. 1933, New York City) is a visual artist known for her sound works, installations, performances, publications, and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962. A founding member of Fluxus, Knowles began using Cagean compositional devices, like indeterminate performance and chance operations in the early 1960s. Knowles collaborated with Marcel Duchamp on a screen reprint of his Coeurs Volants and designed and co-edited John Cage’s Notations (1968), a book of visual music scores. Among her Fluxus performance scores are Make a Salad (1962), Shoes of Choice (1963), and The Identical Lunch (1969). In 1967, Knowles’s The House of Dust was among the first computerized poems. Knowles lives and works in New York City.
Hannah Weiner (b. 1928, Providence, d. 1997, New York City) was an experimental poet often associated with the Language Poets, an avant-garde group of writers including Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein. In the 1970s, she began to compose poems (her “clairvoyant poems”) based on the words she saw on her forehead and other surfaces. Weiner’s published collections include a volume from her pre-clairvoyant period, The Magritte Poems (1970); Clairvoyant Journal (1973); Little Books / Indians (1980); Code Poems (1982); poems based on international maritime codes, SPOKE (1984); The Fast (1992); We Speak Silent (1996); and the compilation Hannah Weiner’s Open House.
Lutz Bacher (1943-2019) lived in Berkeley, California, and New York City. Her archive, The Betty Center, is in New York and open to visitors by appointment.
