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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015) - multimedia lecture performance (five video projectors, multiple audio channel, lighting, rocket maquette and clothing on installed panels, printed text, various stages with different heights, live video editing, music) in collaboration with Ale Bachlechner, Jonathan Kastl, Benjamin Ramirez Perez und Stefan Ramirez Perez
Conceived for PLURIVERSALE II produced and curated by Akademie der Künste der Welt, Köln April 2015.
The project Standing on the shoulders of giants performs and studies a speculative overlapping of three narratives: the expressions of humility in the history of science; Multi-literate relationships between three ancient teachers: Farabi, Mir Damad, and Aristotle; The parasitical and intertwined story of the evolution of lice in vestimentary semiotics.

The metaphors of humility in science goes back further than Newton’s testimony—nanos gigantum humeris insidentes—which on one hand initiates a dreadful respect for the-dead-teacher and on second hand represents a passive-aggressive ambition to achieve scale. By talking about giants we are in the dossiers of climbing, riding, and ascending the landscape of knowledge from the viewpoint of the Anthropos (the one who looks up from the Earth leaping into the beyond), a discursive anatomical relationship invoking an impossible address, recognition, fantasy and cry, towards and by the-one-who-sees-more. Parallel to that reading, bowing-before-the-master has intrigued long and scandalous communications between the cultures in the last millennia; Aristotle to the Bildung of the boys of gymnasium, Farabi’s translatorial nightmares of Aristotle’s unconcentrated thinkings, and so on.



Lecture performance 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' at ACADEMYSPACE Köln 2015 View of the lecture performance 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' at ACADEMYSPACE Köln 2015 Installation view of the lecture performance 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' at ACADEMYSPACE Köln 2015 <br /> The story of lice is the story of parasitical attachments to mobile bodies. Aside from the intellectual bond between the dwarf and the giant, the lice carries on evolving on the shoulders of its host, providing another run for the narrative of climbing—a perverse parasitical perspective into the relationships between the carrier-teacher-master-giant-host and the dwarf-parasite-reader. The human lice developed body motor abilities solely for human hair and has never set foot out of its host’s skin, travelling through the centuries with its companion human species. The transition of homes from the back of Gorillas to Homosapiens coincides with the beginning of hair loss—bad news for the lice. By introducing the hairless-love theory this collision of faiths generates an interesting crossroads of multispecies in human cultural development, the beginning of naked skin romantic love and the creation of vestimentary cover into the human life gives the lice another chance to achieve semiotic scale.

© 2015 Sina Seifee Akademie der Künste der Welt Made possible by the kind support of The Academy of the Arts of the World.