A.3 | EP.10 | Dream Sequence:

(Language as Matter)

Painting as a material condition for language, performance, and transmission. Words acquire different meanings through color, scale, voice, repetition, and circulation, extending their existence beyond the painted surface.

(participant)

Alina Enero

(Organization)

Marciano Art Foundation

(Master Shot)

AROUND LA - MONTAGE

(A)

INT. "GAVE A PARTY FOR THE GODS" PAINTING BACKDROP - AFTERNOON

Before JOHN GIORNO's painting, ALINA ENERO stands in a white dress against a black field. She recites the painting's text. Her figure multiplies across a triptych, each repetition entering on a slight delay. The same words are spoken by successive versions of the same person, producing differences in rhythm, emphasis, and duration. The painted text becomes a vocal composition.

(B)

INT. - "FILLING WHAT IS EMPTY EMPTYING WHAT IS FULL" BACKDROP

A dissolve carries ALINA into another composition, dressed in white against a white field. Her figure doubles, triples, and proliferates across the frame. Repetition alters the spatial relationships between body, painting, and architecture. Figures overlap, disappear, and return, while the distinction between occupied and unoccupied space becomes increasingly unstable.

(c)

INT. - "I RESIGNED MYSELF TO BEING HERE" BACKDROP

The white cube and concrete floor extend toward the fading afternoon light. One panel of the diptych descends slowly beneath the frame. ALINA passes between the remaining panels, crossing a spatial division established by the editing. She pauses, turns, and walks beyond the frame. The composition continues briefly without her.

(Film Abstract)

What happens to language when it becomes painting? At the Marciano Art Foundation's JOHN GIORNO: NO NOSTALGIA exhibition, words occupy painted surfaces as arrangements of color, scale, and space. Giorno's paintings resist the separation of reading from looking, bringing poetry into direct contact with the material and perceptual conditions of painting. Language becomes something to encounter physically, even as its meanings remain subject to interpretation and change.

Drawing on conversations with Giorno Poetry Systems Art Director Anthony Huberman and exhibition curators Carlos Valladares and Hanneke Skerath, the film considers painting as a site of performance and public exchange. Huberman's description of Giorno's paintings as venues for language introduces a relationship between the fixed material object and the unpredictable events it permits. The curators' reflections on feeling and spirit in exhibition-making extend this inquiry into the relationships between artworks, institutions, and their audiences.

Featuring Alina Enero, No Nostalgia stages Giorno's poems before the paintings from which they originate. Through repetition, phasing, layered recordings, and delay, the written words acquire new durations and spatial relationships. A single performer becomes multiple figures; a painted phrase becomes a succession of spoken events. Montage introduces differences that neither the original text nor its performance contains independently. Painting remains the material point of departure, while its language enters the everyday systems through which images, voices, and messages circulate.