The Well Cradle

THE WELL CRADLE

The site where something great was created

Iannis Zannos, Angelos Floros, Marianna Tzislaki Kotsanou

Interactive audio performance

Presented: inSonic 2020: Syntheses, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, online, December 11-13, 2020 link

The work takes its title and its ground from Izutsu, the Noh play built around a well and the wooden frame that encloses it — the well cradle, the surface that returns an image to whoever leans over it. In the play, a woman waits at the well where she and her husband measured their heights as children, and where she now sees his face in place of her own. The site of a childhood measurement becomes the site of an adult recognition, and the boundary between the one who looks and the one who is seen stops holding.

That structure is read here alongside two further systems of thought: the I-Ching, whose entire architecture is built from the alternation of two opposed lines, and the philosophy of Kung Fu, in which practice is understood as the continuous formation of a self rather than the acquisition of a skill.

From these three sources the piece draws its working material — a set of binary oppositions, taken not as categories but as forces:

Female and male. Moon and water. Wind and ground. Past and present.

The argument of the work is that these are not separate realms placed side by side, but the elements out of which human existence is sustained — and that in the experience of a figure they interweave rather than divide. Fantasy and reality are among them, and they are not opposed in the way we assume; each is a condition of the other.

Within this framework, eternal love operates as an existential metaphor with a precise function. It is capable of dismantling the binary construction of identity: of taking traits held to be incompatible and synthesising them into a single expression. The masculine and the feminine are therefore reconsidered — not in order to be reconciled, but in order to reimagine what a spiritual identity and a gendered identity could be if they were not built from opposition in the first place.

The shadow-fighting of traditional Kung Fu carries this through the performance as its central image: a practice performed against an opponent who is not there, and which is understood as the building of consciousness — unfinished by definition, and standing for the human obligation to keep transforming.

The sound is generated live, from the movement of the performers, through synthesis algorithms that use feedback of the audio signal itself, driven by motion sensors worn on the body. The mapping is divided so that two performers work on different aspects of a single sound-producing mechanism at the same time: each is inside the sound the other is making, which is the same proposition the work makes about identity, restated as a technical condition.

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