Four works based on four performances.
The performances were first presented in 2000-2001. The audio documentation from these was reworked substantially in 2021-2022 (6-panel cd sleeve with a 12-page booklet featuring image and text documentation).
l'étranglement (2000-2022):
Strangling the love out of each other while guest André-Éric Létourneau checks his pulse and tracks his blood flow using a medical device. We placed contact mics on each other's throats. The throats swallowed, the strangling arms shook and sweated.
Performed at Casa del Popolo, Montréal, July 29, 2000. An excerpt appeared on the CD accompanying Christof Migone's
Sound Voice Perform (Errant Bodies Press, 2005). This version of l'étranglement lasts the total duration of the performance. The video was edited and mixed in 2021 (glitches in video courtesy of mismatched codecs).
Vito Acconci's undoing (2001-2021):
Dedicated to all salivaphiles.
Inspired by
Vito Acconci's video Waterways: 4 Saliva Studies (1971), Alexandre uses a CD to welcome his spit, and Christof slowly tilts his spit bottle. Both videos were performed in 2001 and mixed together in 2021. The soundtrack to the original piece by Acconci (used by permission) as well as undo's remix, Vito Acconci's undoing, appeared on a CD release by squint fucker press in 2001 (squint 00D).
seize me by the horns (2000-2022):
Stuffing canned snails into our mouths, ears, noses—we mined our bucal cavities for fluid sonorities—then we deranged our electronics.
The recording of the performance in a kitchen on the Plateau in Montréal appeared on the last track of undo's (Christof Migone & Alexandre St-Onge) first publication and the inaugural release of squint fucker press in 2000, un sperme qui meurt de froid en agitant faiblement sa petite queue dans les draps d'un gamin (squint 00A). The same year we performed the piece in front of a live audience at the No Music Festival in London, Ontario. The contorted textual component in the video is from "Turn, turn, turn: undo's dizzy tactics", a performative presentation presented at the first Tuning Speculation: Experimental Aesthetics and the Sonic conference, November 1-2, 2013, at Arraymusic in Toronto. The video of the performance was edited and mixed in 2021.
Disclosure (2001-2021):
One, laying flat along a corridor. Two, hiding in a small space. Three, holding the arm of the other.
Disclosure was performed four times over three days for the PUBLIC SPACES/PRIVATE PLACES series curated by Paul Couillard for FADO, June 28-30, 2001. The location was an empty apartment at 228 1/2 Parliament St., Toronto.
An excerpt of the audio plus photo documentation and the artist statement were originally published in
Surface Tension: Problematics of Site (Errant Bodies Press, 2003). The video of the performance was edited and mixed in 2021.
Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer. Working since the mid-80s, he weaves together a multitude of media, from radio to telephones to digital objects, to form a stunning and highly dynamic practice. Combining an acute sonic sensibility with performative usages of the body, video, and the voice, his work engages corporeal presence with a subtle invasion, unsettling speech and gesture through investigative and theoretical poetics.
Migone is the co-editor, with
Brandon LaBelle, of "
Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language" (
Errant Bodies Press), an anthology and CD on orality, audition, and performance. His writings have been published in Aural Cultures (YYZ), S:ON (Artexte), Experimental Sound & Radio (MIT Press), Radio Rethink (Walter Phillips Gallery) and various catalogs and journals. He has curated a number of events in the sound and radio arts: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), Double Site (1998), stuttermouthface (2002). He has released six solo audio CDs on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral) and has appeared on numerous compilations. He performs extensively in festivals and exhibitions around the world. He has collaborated with choreographers Lynda Gaudreau and Tammy Forsythe, turntablist
Martin Tétreault, performers Claude Wampler and Kim Dawn, and sound artists
Alexandre St-Onge, Michel F. Côté, and Gregory Whitehead.
Christof Migone is the co-founder, with
Alexandre St-Onge, of
Squint.press.
He currently lives in Montréal and teaches at Concordia University.
Alexandre St-Onge is an interdisciplinary artist, a musician and a sonic performer exploring the mutation of the performative body through its sonic, textual and visual mediations.
Philosophiae doctor (PhD) in art (UQAM, 2015) and assistant professor at l'École d'art of Laval University, he is fascinated by creativity as a pragmatic approach to the ungraspable and he has published over twenty works and he presented his work at the
Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery in Montreal, at Sporobole in Sherbrooke, at Latitude 53 in Edmonton, at the Tsonami festival in Valparaiso, at Paved Arts in Saskatoon, at Eastern Bloc and at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal, at Avatar and at Mois Multi in Quebec City, at L'Écart in Rouyn-Noranda, at Action Art Actuel at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, at the Errant Bodies Space in Berlin, at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto, at the festival Send and Receive in Winnipeg and at the Disturbance festival in Copenhagen to name a few places and events.
He founded
éditions|squint|press with
Christof Migone and he worked with collectives and artists such as: Marie Brassard, Simon Brown, Karine Denault, K.A.N.T.N.A.G.A.N.O., Lynda Gaudreau, Klaxon Gueule, kondition pluriel, mineminemine, line Nault, Shalabi Effect, undo and Unzip Violence amongst others.
