Diego Tonus
‘‘‘FILM’’’
Takes place over the whole city of Amsterdam
Various moments between 13 April and 12 May 2012
A group of non-professional performers enters public or private space, acting out laughter tracks composed by the artist from movie, television, Internet and amateur recordings. Acting as director and composer, the artist will give each actor in the work instructions about the laughter that they will perform, and stage directions of their position within public space. Each performer will only be aware of their individual instructions, the composition taking shape and experienced both by the performers and the audience for the first time during the action itself.
In FILM the fluctuating group of performers will move in a whole city performing the compositions in a visible and non-visible ways, depending on the typology of the score. The off-screen laughing choir from cinema and television here take centre set as the subject of the work, their laughter not only acting as a backing track to the scenarios unfolding, but directly effecting them. The gesture of bringing the recorded element of the laughter into everyday life, as a fragment of a film that comes back to reality, taints daily actions in a real world context as a filmic experience in time and space.
FILM is a fragmented scene whose main subject is laughter that is at once Ironic, terrific, terrifying and aggressive. It’s an irreverent and conditioning form of power that could be used as moment of interruption to question forms of power.