"Trajectoire" with Brigitta Horváth
The Concept
Imagine that each footstep you took left a trace. Imagine this trace was a faint penciled mark and every time you retraced your steps, this line became bolder and more pronounced. Image the bird’s eye view of your paths, the maps of your personal trajectories. Then imagine your trajectories were superimposed on the traces of other humans. Imagine the superimposition of all the people around, near and far, the paths of cars, of trains, of bikes, motorcycles and feet the unique signature of their movements.
Now look up at the bird’s trajectory. How the birds seem to move as a single communicating body. The magnetic resonance between them allows them to communicate, wordless and spontaneously, as if directed from one single mind. And how different their plane of movement is from our own. We are, of course, bound by gravity to stay on the earth’s surface, while bird can move in an infinitely larger variation of perpendicular, diagonal and vertical dimensions. Though we humans value so highly the individuality of our separate minds, as we observe and compare the patterns of birds versus humans, there is a great liberty in a bird’s movement. The drawing the trajectory of birds makes is much freer than the human maps of roads and paths and hallways. A bird’s order is inside their minds not in external structure like streets.
The Project
There are two drawing components of this project. One consists of large layered superimposed pencil drawings on tracing paper. These drawings explore different mapping techniques, migratory patterns, footsteps and many other ways to express human movement in lines. The other drawings consist of animated video footage that traces both human and bird trajectory patterns. These videos are projected onto the dancing body of Brigitta Horváth or are independently screened in the exhibition space.
The movement component of this project explores our mind’s relationship to our body, what our body habitually does, what it avoids, what are its patterns and repetitions are. The dance workshops also explore the communication that we have with the bodies and vehicles around us, our modes of movement on a collective map.
The Trajectory project is composed of many multi-media elements, from large pencil drawings on transparent paper, to video animations of human trajectories. It scales from video animation of bird trajectories to dance performances where the dance floor is itself a drawing.
"Trajectoire" is an ongoing, collaborative project that has already had one permutation in April 2015 in Sers, France. The Second “permutation” involved the voice of the choreographer Christine Quoiraud at the Centre Culturel Jean-Gagnant in Limoges, France, in November 2015. The third permutation took place in the theater of Soelys in Soyaux, France, accompanied by the finished exhibition in 2016. At each performance, a different aspect of the project is exposed. Each action is individual and unlike the other performances.
