UIQ (the unmaking-of)

»UIQ (the unmaking-of)« (2015, 78 min) is a spatialized electro-acoustic soundwork, or invisible film, that filmmaker-artists Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni have created around Félix Guattari’s unmade science-fiction screenplay, »Un Amour d’UIQ« (A Love of UIQ).

Working with the paradoxical condition of the unmade as something both already and not yet present, a potential field of shifting forms and forces, the filmmakers have sought to »produce« Guattari’s film through a collective experience of envisioning, without filming a single scene. Wondering how to give shape to the film and to the bodiless entity of its central character, UIQ (the Infra-Quark Universe) – that according to Guattari has no clear sense of identity nor spatial or temporal limits – Maglioni and Thomson decided to embark on a journey, holding a number of »seeances« in several different cities. They invited participants to become the receivers, hosts and transmitters of UIQ, contaminating each other with their visions and ideas of Guattari’s film and of UIQ’s possible manifestations, both within and beyond the limits of the screenplay.

The soundwork recombines recorded fragments of these seeances in a composition of seventy-five voices, woven together with electronic signals and processed field-recordings, elements that circulate in the space, offering glimpses of a missing film and universe that, though invisible, can begin to affect the listener’s vision.

Seeances were hosted by espacio practico/black tulip (Barcelona), ZdB (Lisbon), Univerzita Karlova/Druna (Prague), no.w.here (London), Casco (Utrecht), Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (Aubervilliers) and Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao).

»UIQ (the unmaking-of)« was co-commissioned by The Showroom and the Otolith Collective with the support of Arts Council England and Fluxus, a Franco-British Fund for Contemporary Art.

An event in collaboration with the Archipelago Lab for Transversal Practices, organized by Christoph Brunner