Saturday, November 23rd at 8pm, ISSUE presents Collaborations ex-situ, the culminating commission from 2024 Artist-In-Residence Katie Porter. The composer/clarinetist will return to the organization’s 22 Boerum Pl. theater to present three ongoing collaborations with artists Patricia Alessandrini (electronics, thunder sheet, feedback boxes), Katherine Liberovskaya (live video), and anne penders (voice, text, film). Ex-situ is the idea of an experiment happening off-site, out of its original place and time - just as each of these collaborations took root due to different chance meetings, at other times and places in the artist’s lives. Somehow all connected to the desert, Porter brings these sounds and feelings to the stage.
Porter’s minimal graphic scores are a place to exist in: small notebooks with a few pitches, text, asks for musicians (and non-musicians) to make choices and play their own carefully crafted extended sounds - sometimes with hand drawn rocks, flowers, spirals, mazes, or systems expanding and collapsing on themselves. These experiments have inspired Porter to make more music about community, collaboration, and togetherness.
Notes from Katie Porter on Collaborations ex-situ:
A few years ago, Patricia Alessandrini met me out at Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, with a six-foot long metal thunder sheet strapped to the top of her car. I brought the bass clarinet, and some other essentials from my home in Utah: a handy knife, extra winter blankets, sunhats, flashlights, the battery-powered multitrack recorder. We were joined by a few adventurous friends and artists, and we camped and recorded until we were exhausted that evening. When the wind finally stopped blowing at 6:30am, Patricia and I woke up and recorded a track of solo bass clarinet going through transducers onto the giant thunder sheet; processed live, some sort of crazy magic sounds happened during the sunrise, resonating the tunnels from within. We didn't really plan any of it. But it was what we were there to do, and it was beautiful. I have been waiting to capture that kind of beauty again with Patricia for awhile, and this will be our first time performing since then. I feel as though playing with her will bring us back to that moment, reminding us of what it feels like to play for the desert as the sun rises for just us.
I continue to think about loops and spirals, as I circled around a lot last year with Katherine Liberovskaya and Phill Niblock, meeting them in places we had met before, performing Phill's new piece for two bass clarinets with Lucio Capece, and playing with live audio and video improvisations by both Katherine and Phill, here in New York, in Berlin, in Brussels, and in Ostrava, looping around. Somehow I got them both to come out to Utah last summer, and we took a long drive to southern Utah together with flutist Christine Tavolacci, through my bug-stained car window Phill took pictures, and we ate ice cream along the way, and got out of the car to see the red rocks, stayed on the Colorado River, driving and driving, napping, and talking a lot. It was a new loop, and an unforgettable one. In this collaboration with Katherine, I know we are still spinning around, we both lost a lot since that time last summer, and our lives both changed drastically. We are playing some of these spirals and loops we find ourselves in, an homage to "the work", which is all about people, and sometimes also about place.
When Anne Penders and I met for the first time, late at night after a weird, cold show in a little chapel in Brussels, we couldn't believe all of our connections: the lives we were living as mothers, as artists, the things we've lost, land artworks, and the west. I had somehow met the other person who got a flat tire out at Sun Tunnels, and who wrote about memory and time, like I did/do, a land art historian (!), with archival interviews on tape "somewhere in her house," and a strong desire to collaborate, and make new art around these experiences and longings. So Anne and I tried, very slowly, for the next two years to make a work remotely, as we both grew in our own thoughts and practices. We called it MUD. And then, this Fall, we spent a week residency creating three new works, weaving Anne's words, my music and bass clarinet, some of Nancy Holt's musings from the tapes, field recordings, and Anne's Super 8 films together. It's still MUD, and the work is very much centered on how we make our art in our lives, in our minds, in our pasts, and in the tumultuous present. “Traveling is part of the work.”
Katie Porter is a Brooklyn-based clarinetist, performer/composer, writer, and artist whose work draws from decades of experimental performance practices to create structures for music perception in space and time (over lifetimes or subtle daily increments/abstractions). She is currently a 2024 Artist-In-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Devoted to collaboration, Katie's current projects include: Phase to Phase a bass clarinet duo with Lucio Capece in Berlin, Malosma a bass clarinet and bass flute duo with Christine Tavolacci in LA, Eternities with noise artist Bob Bellerue in NYC, Red Desert Ensemble, MOONS with Judith Berkson, Laura Cetilia, and Christine Tavolacci, Quartet or Two Duos with James Ilgenfritz, Lucie Vítková, and Teerapat Parnmonkol in NYC, MUD with poet/filmmaker Anne Penders in Brussels, and Greenstone/Hennies/Porter with Sarah Hennies and Madison Greenstone. Passionate about fostering musical communities, she co-founded Listen/Space in Brooklyn, the Listen/Space Commissions in the mountains of Utah, and the biennial VU Symposium for experimental, electronic and improvised music. She has performed in many US & International ensembles, festivals, and venues, both storied and underground such as: Abrons Art Center, American Mavericks, Centre Acanthes, C4NM, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Green Umbrella Series, Ghost Ensemble, Fridman Gallery, Human Resources, Indexical, Issue Project Room, Kenyon College, The Kitchen, KLANGRAUM, KM28 Berlin, L Collective, Lincoln Center, Liquid Music Series, LOLA, NOVA Chamber Music, Ostravská Banda, Piano+, MOMA PS1, Roulette, Rhizome DC, The Stone, SOUND at the Schindler House, and SEM Ensemble. She can be heard on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Gravity Wave / Erstwhile (US), Edition Wandelweiser (DE), FTARRI (Japan), Infrequent Seams (US), Karl Records (DE), Editions Verde (US), Harmonic Ooze Records (US), and her writings are published in the journal Sound American. Katie is working to record a giant multi-year project for solo clarinet in Nancy Holt's land artwork, Sun Tunnels, in the remote Utah desert.
Patricia Alessandrini is a composer/sound artist known for her interactive and theatrical compositions, installations, and performances. Her works engage with the concert repertoire and explore issues of representation, perception, and memory, often addressing social and political themes. A performer, instrument-maker and improviser of live electronics, she also researches embodied interaction and immersive audiovisual experiences, including designing instruments for inclusive performance. Her works have been presented worldwide across five continents, including festivals such as Donaueschinger Musiktage, Gaudeamus, Festival-Musica, Mostly Mozart, Salzburg Biennale, and Wien Modern. Alessandrini studied composition and electronics at the Conservatorio di Bologna, Conservatoire de Strasbourg, and IRCAM, earning PhDs from Princeton University and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queen’s University Belfast. She has taught composition and computer music at institutions including Goldsmiths, University of London, and Stanford's CCRMA, and is currently Professor of Artistic Research at the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne. Alessandrini’s works are published by Babelscores, and may be consulted at patriciaalessandrini.net. Her portrait CD was released on Huddersfield Contemporary Records in 2023, and her feedback improvisation duo CD with Marco Fusi will be released on Sideband Records in 2024. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022 and a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2024.
Katherine Liberovskaya is a Canadian intermedia artist based in NYC. Involved in experimental video since the 80's, she has produced numerous single-channel video art pieces, video installations and video performances, as well as works in other media, that have been shown around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of moving image with sound/music in various both ephemeral and fixed forms (projections, installations, performances), notably through collaborations with many composers and sound artists in improvised live video+sound concert situations where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory "music" for the eyes. For over 22 years she collaborated with her partner composer/intermedia artist Phill Niblock on various live, video and installation projects. Other frequent collaborators include: Keiko Uenishi, Shelley Hirsch, Dafna Naphtali, Barbara Held, Mia Zabelka, Al Margolis (IF,BWANA), David Watson, among many others. In addition to her art work she curates events in experimental video/film, sound/music and A/V performance, notably the yearly Screen Compositions evenings at EI NYC since 2005 and, since 2006 the OptoSonic Tea salons (co-curated with Ursula Scherrer) in NYC and various nomadic locations in North America and Europe as well as on-line during the Covid pandemic. In 2014 she completed a PhD in art practice entitled "Improvisatory Live Visuals: Playing Images Like a Musical Instrument" at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She is currently the artistic director of Experimental Intermedia NYC.
Writer, artist, phd in art history, anne penders is an interdisciplinary artist working with text, images, sounds, archives, and calling it “writing”. Her work is poetical and political, always trying to question position (both theoretical and territorial) in a troubled world. After concentrating on a certain idea of China (2001-2014), she chose to focus her research around Greece (2012-2021…). An encounter with a biologist in Athens led to a long term ongoing project called “peripou”, born out of a search on memory and bees and leading much further. She currently lives in and around Brussels where she develops new projects using historical and personal archives : “North America Backwards” and “shelter / nos échelles”. She regularly collaborates with other artists (among others, recently, Zoe Suliko, Ronni Shalev and Katie Porter with whom she created the duo MUD). She has published books (essays, novels, poetry, artists books), made numerous shorts films and sound creations (fiction, experimental documentaries and installations). She has also taught in diverse art schools, and still does when invited.
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