“The book, here and now, with its author and reader, either uttered or silent, is a performance. Bookperformance is a naked, fixed and textual body. If movement is impossible for a fixed body, to turn the impossible into the possible, it is necessary to attempt the weird and the absurd. In order to successfully attempt the weird and the absurd, you must possess not only a considerable intelligence but also an extraordinary courage for realizing and accepting the significant power of the weird and the absurd. To be able to do all these it is necessary to be a good reader”.
Bookperformance Manifesto, principle 1/7
In the series of “Body & Sound of I & Eye : Bookperformance”, Çiğdem tells how a book (as an object) becomes a book in its physicality. Readers / Audience is welcome to join the performance, which is a very nature of Çiğdem’s “bookperformance”.
The challange in this specific bookperformance (that happened in the context of Europalia Arts Festival) is a long durational event that happened on 4 different days on the same page that transformed each time with the intention of becoming a universal book : 14, 18, 23, 30 November in 2015.
The construction of the the initial page that respresents “Structure in Ecriture” lasted 7 hours, and included the outfit construction of the performance as well. Upon this page, each day’s bookperformance took 40 minutes and passes through these stages:
0.Structure in Ecriture 1. Construction stones 2. Writing on earth 3. Telling in the air 4. Destructure in Literature
Languages that contributed to the happening of this bookperformance: Dutch, English, French, Turkish.