Radio Papesse

His idea of knife-play did not go further than the notion that all strokes should be directed upwards (2013) is a single, linear field recording of one hour. It was recorded on the outskirts of Beirut, Lebanon, along the side of the road that runs along the coast of the country North to South.

For a couple years Steven Chodoriwsky has been conducting research in Lebanon, in the southern part of the country to be exact, dealing with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) which is a peacekeeping mission in the buffer zone territory separating Lebanon and Israel.

For a number of reasons (bureaucratic, institutional, personal) physical access was difficult to achieve, and proper fieldwork difficult to accomplish. The recording, a peripheral act of fieldwork, almost a proxy attempt at fieldwork in lieu of the thing itself, is taken during an afternoon when there was a plan to go south with his colleague but he was left waiting for an undisclosed duration on the curb beside a parking lot along the highway.

During the waiting, he observed the southbound traffic, plodding and relentless, and attempted, to the best of his abilities, to identify the company names of each car as they pass, counterproductively passing his time perhaps, also taking note of the frequency of certain brands over others, pausing over the anomalies and somehow demonstrating the absurdity of the fact that they were all travelling southwards - and not him. He was the only pedestrian as there was no sidewalks along the road.

Steven Chodoriwsky's practice employs built form, text, performance, photography and installation. He has held independent research positions at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu. He received degrees in architecture from Tokyo Institute of Technology and University of Waterloo‎. Most recently he taught at Cornell University. He lives in Los Angeles.