Mark So & Manfred Werder | Villa For Forest

Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars

Mark So and Manfred Werder have been working together intensively for 20 years, exclusively in the USA and México. They essentially work on long-term writing projects that emerge from a practice that reflects the fragmented everyday. There is nothing but inscription, into the earth and bodies, papers and tapes, as the earliest of techniques in the cosmologically impenetrable that is cultural history. Mark So and Manfred Werder perform with voices, portable tape recorders and typewriters, paper and notebooks, evidences, traces, objects.

Eintritt frei!

Mark So & Manfred Werder:

Mark So and Manfred Werder began their collaboration in 2006 with the long-term actualization of the score Bangs, a postcard score of Mark’s. Manfred’s actualization emphasized the potential of music to remain underground in search of its actual effectiveness that a composition is capable of inscribing implicitly into its actualization. This approach in turn led Mark to publish a book with their correspondences before the actualization of the score had been completed.  In 2011, upon Manfred’s invitation, a larger group of people, including Mark So with whom he was touring the USA, gathered at the north and south entrance of Prospect Park in Brooklyn in order to cross the park at dusk into the darkness of the night in endless personal lines and curves. Since 2016, Mark So and Manfred Werder have come regularly together in Los Angeles, Marfa TX and Ciudad de México, working in the public urban spaces and performing and exhibiting at venues and art spaces such as Automata LA, Foyer-LA, Trade School Altadena, Marfa Book Co, or Casa del Lago UNAM and PM in Ciudad de México.

Both composers eminently work with language as found reality which they constantly process into infinite transparent layers of text and enunciation regarding the world. While Manfred works with typewriters and found paper, Mark treats analog tapes and notebooks in an intensive process of transcription, i.e. writing, reading, recording and reproducing in endless loops which over the years have grown into an outstanding density of radically fragmented musical poetics.  The deep mutual understanding in their respective practices reaches its instance in often extended performances: both music and language find a new place where their supposed antagonism leads to a manifestation of world, where the name in the word and the physics of ideation lightly and tenderly celebrate the implosion of historical time. (MW)

BIOGRAPHIES:

Mark So (USA, 1978).

BA, Pomona College (Claremont, CA), 2000. MFA, Music Composition, California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA), 2006. Mark So works at the cusp of experimental music and poetics. His work has been presented around the world in formal and informal contexts, with recent performances, installations, listening rooms, and streetwork in L.A., Portland, Marfa, New York, Toronto, and Mexico City, including ongoing collaborations with composer Manfred Werder and others. His work has recently appeared in print in Walking from Scores (edited by Elena Biserna), Peripheries Journal No. 5, The Open Space, and with poet Tim Johnson, Pathetic Literature (edited by Eileen Myles). Marfa Book Co. published A Box of Wind, collecting nearly 300 scores from his Ashbery series. Recordings have been released on caduc, editions wandelweiser, winds measure, The Open Space, and his own death-spiral. He lives in and out of Los Angeles.

https://www.instagram.com/_mark_so_/

Manfred Werder (Switzerland, 1965).

Manfred Werder is wandering through the abundance in which he traces all possible enunciation regarding the world. His recent works [ the inscription of the sun ] and [ the music of history ] continue the practice of reflection and inscription of both found materials through the sun and typewriter and the public space through dérive. Earlier works include stück 1998 and performer series (1999- ), ten 4000 page scores whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realizations have been ongoing since December 1997. Lives in situ.