Score for Becoming (video, 2020)

commissioned by Oude Kerk & Mister Motley (NL)




Please find the work following this link.
https://www.mistermotley.nl/world-after-10-david-helbich/

Score for becoming is part of the series Scores for looking out the window.

This video was produced as a quick response to a request by the Oude Kerk (Amsterdam) in collaboration with art magazine Mister Motely (NL) for their series "The World After". Their series asks a variety of artists to respond to questions about the Anthropocene after the Coronavirus pandemic.

After online publication, the work was also part of the group exhibition "The world after - Conversation Pieces" in the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam in 2020, together with works by Aimée Zito Lema, Children of the Light, Geo Wyeth, David Helbich, Germaine Kruip, Hans van Houwelingen, Iswanto Hartono, Marc Mulders, Marinus Boezem, Madelon Hooykaas, PolakVanBekkum, Ruchama Noorda, Sarah van Sonsbeeck, Smári Róbertsson, Stéphanie Saadé, Yair Callender.

https://oudekerk.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/the-world-after-conversation-pieces/1147

screenshot

screenshot with a drawing by Anne van de Star


How should we prepare ourselves for the time after the lock-down?

I try to answer this question at the moment that Europe slowly opens up again, in various tempi through out the union and even with a divers variety of reactions by people, even just in one city, in my case Brussels. From one part to the other the streets look like two cities, one part filled with relief and maybe exaggeration, the other with doubt and control.

As many of us, I have a hard time thinking straight, establishing a feeling of overview and perspective. But also, as many, I fell back on my body, my physical memory and my senses, to get through time, locked up and down, inside my house, outside my house, on the streets, in the grocery stores. And in every meeting, with every social contact. What shamefully is called Social Distancing (and should be called physical respect) is actually an inscription into our bodies, skin and thought, in movement and stillness.

If there is any preparation, not for the time after, but for the time from since, from now and for then, it is a kind of training or practice, that prepares our individual self for the social re-negotiation and choreographies in being someone with others. The dances of our eyes, the reading of each others sounds, the feeling of presences and the negotiation of greetings.

Anyhow, let’s prepare, let’s be prepared, every moment, to prepare. To find again and again ways to be someone with others, to be sympathetic and stay social and to become a student of and a teacher to all of us.

Here is a mini score for becoming


Use your tongue in our mouth as if it was a joystick for your eyes. Turn your tung inside your mouth form up to down, form left to right, slowly and quickly, each time following with your gaze, turning your head, and, if necessary, your entire body.

Let this change how you feel about what is in- and what is outside of your body.

And, most importantly, enjoy doing weird stuff.

David Helbich, 5th of May 2020

 

instrumental compositions & co.

Album NYH

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