Gentle Resistors is an improvised evening of musical blind-dates

Composition is the result of an editing process in which one’s impulses are passed through the critical filter of the conscious mind: only the “good” ideas are allowed to pass through. Improvisation is more like free association, in which ideas are allowed to express themselves without having to pass this test, somehow avoiding the barriers erected by consciousness.

As a reaction and response to The Mind-Blowing Institute, Gentle Resistors is an improvised evening of musical blind-dates organized by Alexander Iezzi. Each group of musicians will perform improvised sets of about 40 minutes in response to thematics presented by the works in the exhibition: freedom, constraint, vulnerability, mysticism, and conflicting opposites.

Improvisation is a game that the mind plays with itself, in which an idea is allowed to enter the playing field, in order to be kicked around in. pleasing patterns for a moment before being substituted by another idea. The first idea is unintentional, an error, a wrong note, a fumble in which the ball is momentarily lost, a momentary surfacing of an unconscious impulse normally kept under cover. The play to which it is subjected is the graceful recovery of the fumbled ball, a second “wrong” note that makes the first one seem right, the justification for allowing the idea to be expressed in the first place.”*

Performers include Jon Campolo & Benjamin Jaffe from New York, as well as a group of Rotterdam-based artists and musicians including Bergur Anderson, Angelica Falkeling, Sara Hamadeh, Yanik Soland, and Iezzi, with music intermissions selected by Ioana

* Rzewski, Frederic, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation”, Current Musicology, No. 67/68, Fall 1999, Columbia University Libraries

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