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Manfred Werder
Zürich — Switzerland
Biography
Composer, performer, curator, lives in situ. Manfred Werder focuses on possibilities of rendering the practices regarding composition and field. His recent scores have featured either found sentences from poetry and philosophy, or found words from whatever sources. His performances, both indoors and outdoors, aim at letting appear the world’s natural abundance. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997.
Description of work with field recording
THE FIELD Le pré, aussi, est une façon d’être. Décidons de nous y laisser aller, aujourd’hui. The field, as well, is a way of being. Let’s decide to drift there, today. (Francis Ponge: La Fabrique du Pré (Paris, le 22 octobre 1 960), 1 971 ) (transl. MW) nature has unconditioned reality (Schelling, 1 799; cit.: Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 2008, p 21 ) I propose the field not to be a ‘material’. ‘Material’ would be that what a phenomenological assumption once more identifies as isolated objects to be perceived. ‘Silence’ has been one method of breaking this phenomenological assumption: The experienced extensions of the places of performance have definitely provoked the field to be of central concern. We could identify ‘material’ with Kant as the world’s appearance for us. How can we think the extension of a place not exclusively projected/experienced by a limited group of privileged subjects (performers and audience)? The extension of a place where all is permanently drifting in its own right. The intrinsic reality of a situation. All is permanently drifting, thus we might say: There is no outside the performative. I don’t talk of predicates (variables, characteristics, properties) of a world (they describe the world’s appearances for me) but I do of the world’s mere operating. There is no outside the field. It also includes the digital silence in the editing of a ‘recording’ as a possible frame, as far as it unconditions this specific reality, as one conceptual form of the field. Personally I prefer not having the human subject privileged in its relation to the world A spider is integrating parts of my body in its cobweb. The field: Be it unconditioned reality.