CONDYLURA09
w/LUCIANO MAGGIORE
Chairs, stones and meaningful numerical lists
2024
Edition of 100
20 pages
Broadsheet
supported by Nub e Xing
10 €
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Condylura publishes a free digital copy at sold-out
Chairs, stones e numerical lists transfigure the condylura into a weird portrait, through symptomatic elements, of Luciano Maggiore’s performance practice. Actions that respond to opaque intentions, hidden between the folds of mathematical scores, showing an occult spirit and almost resembling séances, albeit resolutely anti-spectacular: spectrality without ghosts.
TEXT
Chairs, stones and meaningful numerical lists presents a selection of drawings created on various types of carbon paper and then scanned, featuringchairs and stones, complemented by pages of numerical sequences andinteraction marks: the performance scores drawn from the artist's notebook. This graphic series includes recurring figures that evoke the performative practice of Luciano Maggiore, a musician born in Palermo and based in London, whose performances are often reduced to a triad of chair, artist, and discreet electro-acoustic devices. Actions that respond to opaque intentions, hidden within the folds of mathematical scores, showing an occult spirit and almost resembling séances, albeit resolutely anti-spectacular.
Much like these pages, Luciano Maggiore's work is characterized by a specific evocative intensity, capable of sparking speculation despite its direct apparatus, almost literal as this title, hard-edged yet elusive. The remediation process of the drawings, across carbons and lasers, calls to mind several of his records—such as Willy Nilly (Senufo 2014) or Pietra e Oggetto (Koolhas 2020)—where the layering and concretion of sound transform minimal, static sources into environmental resonances. Eerie atmospheres that suggest organic, corporeal, or animal elements, which yet appear to reach us from elsewhere—an aspect playfully inverted, but equally alienating, in the album Very Cheap Non-Human Animal Imitations (Xong 2022).
These soundscapes recall, in keeping with the theme of stones, the Stone Tape Theory—a 19th-century parapsychological idea, recurring in weird literature, which posits that events, emotions, and repressed individual or social memories are imprinted in stones, which transmit them as ghosts and paranormal phenomena. Stones also feature in his recent work 9 pietre, created for Nub’s Licheni platform, revealing a relationship between this figure and the question of spectatorship. Maggiore conducted an experiment with eight participants, who remained still in an empty room for about an hour, to register the equivalent of nine stones positioned in the space. This minimal performance, governed by a principle of absolute stillness—destined to fail—extends to the private listening experience, inviting resonance with this séance. The act of listening inevitably conjures sinister imaginaries, interwoven with relationships of presence and absence, or more precisely, the failure of each. As Mark Fisher describes, the eerie manifests when something is present where there should be nothing [the failure of absence], or when there is nothing present where there should be something [the failure of presence].
A fine, almost ethereal trace, composed of remnants and emanations, evokes the artist’s phantom-like presence, inhabiting chairs like a shadow or specter. The chair often accompanies Luciano Maggiore in his performances, serving as a tool to anchor and tune his stage presence, consistent with his practice of reducing the apparatus to an estranging imaginary. A recent example is N units out of 120, a duet performance where Maggiore, seated opposite an identical empty chair to which is taped a smartphone as speaker, performs a rhythmic score using a dog training clicker. This skeletal execution—evoking the concretism and behaviorism of the event scores by NO PA / PA ON (with Louie Rice)—also hints at the spectacles of 19th-century spiritualism and illusionism. This suggestion is not far-fetched, considering one of Maggiore's early projects, Angstarbeiter (with Ezio Puglia and Dominuqe Vaccaro), which explored the ghost as a scene, across theater and pre-cinema.
Not just chairs and stones, but also meaningful numerical lists… whose meaning remains concealed. Luciano Maggiore’s performances confront the spectator, demanding absolute, almost petrified attention and a concrete presence that is weighed and registered in every facet. At the foundation lies the score apparatus—be it compositional or behavioral—partially revealed in live performance and often resonding to the audience’s presence, or rather, the failure of their absence and incorporeality. Chairs, stones and meaningful numerical lists offers a weird portrait, through symptomatic elements, of Luciano Maggiore’s performative practice, amidst presence and absence, the spectral and the spectatorial—or, to quote Ezio Puglia, a spectrality without ghosts.