Following on from their exhibition 'it took forever getting ready to exist' at The Showroom Gallery (London, 12 February-28 March 2015), for their residency at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson wish to develop and share an experimental space in which to explore new lines of research and forms of collective engagement inspired by the motor of Félix Guattari's unmade science-fiction film Un Amour d’UIQ – the Infra-quark Universe.

In Guattari’s original script, UIQ, an invisible alien force from a parallel dimension, makes contact with and contaminates a community of outsiders while simultaneously interfering with global communications networks, as it begins to develop consciousness and to desire a form for itself (a face, a body, a language) commensurate with the world of its hosts.

Guattari began work on the project at the beginning of the 1980s – initially in collaboration with US independent filmmaker Robert Kramer – and his radical vision for a subversive popular cinema would occupy him on and off for the next seven years, while his notion of a machinic “Infra-quark” Universe suggests an alluring science-fictional relay to the theoretical research that informed Guattari’s last major works, Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Chaosmosis, as well as connecting to his militant activities – from his involvement with the Italian Autonomia movements to free radio and Institutional Psychotherapy.

Working with the paradoxical condition of the unmade as something both already and not yet present, a potential field of shifting forms and forces, Maglioni and Thomson have developed a number of variations around UIQ, beginning from their editing and designing a publication of the original script, with the collaboration of psychoanalyst Isabelle Mangou (Editions Amsterdam, 2012). These include a radio trailer for the missing film (Arte Radio, 2012), several performances, talks and un-workshops, their own film In Search of UIQ (2013) and, most recently, an attempt to produce Guattari's film without filming a single scene, through a collective experience of contamination and envisioning.

This cinematic process evolved during a series of "seeances" held in different cities in Europe, one of which took place in Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers in January 2015. At times entering into the hypnagogic state of a collective hypnosis, participants inhabited a zone of autonomous temporality where, in response to key sequences from the script, they became the hosts, receivers and transmitters of UIQ, contaminating each other in turn with their own visions and ideas of Guattari’s film and of UIQ’s possible manifestations, both within and beyond its limits.
Fragments of these seeances were then recombined into a polyphonic soundwork, 'UIQ (the unmaking-of)', installed as the central piece of Maglioni and Thomson's Showroom exhibition. Composed of myriad voices and electronic signals, this work offers glimpses of a missing film and universe that, though invisible, may begin to affect the listeners' own vision.

The peculiar time-space of both the seeances and the soundwork mark a starting point for research towards new forms and protocols of Infra-quark investigation which Maglioni and Thomson will develop during their residency at Les Laboratoires, beginning in Autumn 2015 – forms suggested by, but at the same time going beyond and perhaps even subverting, the frame of Guattari’s film.


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Publication
http://www.editionsamsterdam.fr/un-amour-duiq/

Bande annonce radiophonique pour un film manquant
http://www.arteradio.com/son/616182/un_amour_d_uiq/

Film In Search of UIQ
http://www.phantom-productions.org/films/in-search-of-uiq/

Exposition personnelle 'it took forever getting ready to exist'
http://www.theshowroom.org/programme.html?id=1998



View of the solo show 'it took forever getting ready to exist', at The ShowRoom in London