Cover Video by Joey Agresta
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Reflections
Kate Mohanty: “I had anticipated I’d be surprised by whatever came after”
Mia Pinheiro: “we will exchange something with all of its broken routes and accidentals”
Joey Agresta is an audio and visual artist currently living in Burlington VT.
I liked the concept so it was interesting to see where people went with it. There’s so much that goes into the synthesis of one work for the next. On one hand I didn’t want to be too literal but also wanted a reader to enter my piece and engage with some essence of the last. I thought it was funny that what I saw was not necessarily what the artist intended to draw. And it turned out that I didn’t care as much when my piece was interpreted—-I’m not an expert in avant-garde jazz-—as to how literal or not the interpretation was. It seemed more important that the next artist had something to work off of, something that moved them sufficiently to do whatever they needed to do.
I found Yanyi's statement about this process to be especially moving. His opening line where he states his struggle with "being faithful to the idea of not altering the original piece." I was struck by this as, considering the nature of the varying artistic mediums present throughout the first issue of Tele-, I personally came into it with the assumption that whatever I was sent would turn out to be altered fairly automatically. Translating words into melodic music calls for that, but I found his stating that he struggled with this interesting and quite honest.
I was surprised as to what my piece led to with Mia Pinheiro's video, although I had anticipated I’d be surprised by whatever came after my piece because I was curious what someone would do with my idiosyncratic saxophone playing.
Looking at the whole spectrum of work translated, I think of communication: language of the body, spoken language, written, objects—-all being a variety of symbols intrinsically personal and lonely, yet embedded within a thin web of uncountable tangles and junctures where any beam of expression shot into the realm of others will be tragically and beautifully both mistaken and reconstructed. You will never know what I mean when I say, and I will never know what color your pupils take, but we will exchange something with all of its broken routes and accidentals and maybe the only important thing is not the perfection of clarity, but that we've met.