Benjamin Seror, Mime Radio, Sternberg Press,
2015.
Mime Radio was
performed and written orally by French artist Benjamin Seror at a
series of events over a two-year period, then transcribed and edited
into a novel. The story revolves around a cast of eccentric
characters, who meet at the Tiki Coco, a bar in Los Angeles that
holds “Challenging Reality Open Mic” nights for amateur inventors
and performers. Eventually, the protagonists get caught up in trying
to help Marsyas, a character from ancient Greek mythology that lost
his body after being defeated in a music contest against the god
Apollo, to recover his voice, his very ancient voice. Unbeknownst to
them, this recovery unleashes a disaster… Mime Radio is a novel
about how language and perception can be one and the same.
"This is the story of an ancient voice. This is the story of how
Marsyas, poor Marsyas, recovered his voice millions of years after
having lost it".
The Stedelijk
Museum, in close collaboration with Kunstverein Amsterdam, is proud
to present the final chapter in the performance series Mime Radio,
which consists of an ongoing staged novel by artist Benjamin Seror.
The story begins in a bar located in Los Angeles, the Tiki Coco. The
bar is the center of the story where every night, a group of people
attend the "Challenging Reality Open Mic" during which the
audience is invited to take the microphone to present some new tools,
techniques or ideas that could extend reality or at least shake it at
it a bit. This meeting will see the growing friendship between four
characters: Angie, Bernhard, Benjamin and David, as they move
together to the Solog House built by one of them in the Hudson River
Valley. This is also where they discover they have been followed by
Marsyas, a character from ancient Greek mythology that lost his body
after being defeated in a musical contest against the god Apollo. The
characters proceed to help Marsyas to recover his voice, his very
ancient voice, without knowing what disaster this recovery could
unleash.
Each chapter of the
novel has been staged through a cycle of improvised performances
which are subsequently transcribed to be published in their entirety
at a later stage. One of the main concerns of this project is the use
of a public event as a possible writing technique, following the
principles of Cinema Vérité as described by Jean Rouch and Edgar
Morin when collaborating on Chroniques d’un été (1960), a film
about the impact of different camera movements on a situation and
what its presence enables that would not otherwise be possible. In
these films, the audience replaced the camera and the central
question becomes: what would change for an author if s/he were to
write a story directly addressed to a particular audience?
The main subject of
this novel is language itself. What are the possibilities of words,
and how can they be used in ways that produce situations? These
questions are also paramount to all the different protagonists of
the story who come together at the Tiki Coco. At this bar, they
organize nightly events where they stretch the limits of language to
describe tools that challenge reality. Most of the characters that
appear in the novel come from other novels such as Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, as well as living artists with whom Seror is in
dialogue.
Many artists write novels, many novelists consider writing as art.
And each of them has its own way of dealing with the process of
writing itself. Thomas Wolfe was so tall that he was using the top of
his refrigerator as a table. John Cheever wrote some of his stories
wearing underwear. Flannery O’Connor was writing facing the back of
cloth dresser. And French artist Benjamin Seror has been writing his
novel Mime Radio, as he calls it “in public”, which means a use
of public events as a possible writing technique.
The story appeared
in orally written occasional chapters that have been presented as a
series of improvised performances in different venues (such as Witte
de With in Rotterdam or LACE in Los Angeles) and being recorded, then
transcribed and edited are waiting to be publish in a form of a book.
It’s allegedly last, twelfth stage took place on 26th of June 2014
at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and was preceded by two other
performances (of chapter X and XI) at Kunstverein Amsterdam.
Benjamin Seror
performing in the Stedelijk Museum, photo Ernst van Deursen
For one evening the
Stedelijk’s Teijin Auditorium transformed into a vision of a
fictitious bar Tiki Coco - a place in Los Angeles where gather the
protagonists of Seror’s story: Angie, Bernhard, Benjamin, David and
Marsyas. However, the atmosphere of the place was evidently more
official than befits a local bar. Tables were covered with white
cloth, wine was served during the event, dim light. Everything to
celebrate “The Very Ambitious Final Chapter”.
Although personally
I am not entirely convinced if this glamour fit the intimacy of
Seror’s performance. One thing is certain, it made him even more
nervous than usual and it needs to be add here that Benjamin, as he
says, reaches the numbing level of adrenalin easily. On the other
hand Seror did this his asset by trying to overcome the stress in a
very charming and funny way and thereby gaining some time to calm
down and winning the sympathy of the audience. And that was even more
important as the novel had been written addressed directly to
particular public of the evening.
Inspired by magical
realism, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Roberto Bolano’s prose, Mime
Radio is a staged novel that while extending of its story it studies
how the memory act, evolves and migrates to become eventually
fiction. Accompanied from time to time by live music in a spirit of
New Order (as Benjamin Seror is also a musician) could be placed
somewhere between radio play and monodrama.
Benjamin Seror
performing in the Stedelijk Museum, photo Ernst van Deursen
Seror, playing with
imagination, made people conscious where they were in the story but
he was not trying to make them to be a part of it or forced to
visualize things he was talking about. The audience was a reader
whose only control of time had been distorted. One couldn’t any
more steer the time of turning pages.
The narrative of
Mime Radio seemed to be pretty developed and expanded, however it was
the language that was the main protagonist in this story. It had a
power to transform the space into book which pages were unfolded into
time. Written word became spoken, and the speech - a tool for
triggering fancy. The phantoms of literature appeared in dialogue
with living artists with whom Seror is befriended.
In these realms the
events organized at Tiki Coco around “Challanging Reality Open
Mic”, during which the people are invited to introduce techniques
or ideas that could extent or shake the reality, presented by Seror
as a part of the plot, became reality itself. Fictional and the real
emerged as parallel presents. “In ancient times one could be killed
by fiction”, said one of the last sentences of the “Mime Radio”.
Books are records of
events that haven’t happened yet, claimed Blanchot. Seror’s
journey with a novel is not entirely completed yet although he
managed to leave particles of his story in our heads. I am wondering
if the printed version would be necessarily then…Weronika Trojanska
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