Familiar Stories (and other strange discoveries)

Blank - 2

I don’t know where this photo was taken, but it is part of the story I will tell tonight. The main character is a young woman who is not interested in politics at all.

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When her father asked her to pose in front of the monument together with her mother, she leaned against the fence in an elegant yet provocative manner and put on a questioning smile. Her mother, a non-smoked cigarette in her right hand, grasped the fence as if it could save her from falling or walking away. There is a kind of routine in the way both put their shoes and sandals on display. While we are still looking at their feet, a woman crosses the street in the back. She’s not part of the story, so we might forget about her quickly, when we move on to the next picture

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which shows a typical day on the beach. She was about to dive into the water when being caught by the camera. A young boy is pointing at her from the distance. Her nephew. She’s missing to make the family arrangement complete.

(Extract from script for "Familiar Stories")

slideshow performance in london in march

Family photos draw a line between centre and margin. In the centre: an almost united family (only the photographer is missing). In the margin: some blurred landscape with a passer-by. Now let’s cross the line and see what happens…

strange forms of life - slideshow

strange forms of life - extract

(...)
At about the same time another man runs for his life. His bare feet almost do not touch the icy ground as he tries to move faster than the huge ship behind him that is breaking the ice he had crossed just a moment before into big white islands. He is running towards us but he cannot come closer. We are out of reach.

(slide)

To be more precise, we are sitting in a dark room that is illuminated by one source of light pointing at a blank canvas. There are no other sources of light although we know that out there in this district of the city, lights are directed onto streets and shops and billboards and museums, but this is of no interest for us at the moment, as we are forming our own district by means of a source of light and some folded lines. In our district there are borderlines forming landscapes of extension and intension, enclosing points, expanding and limiting zones between us and our neighbours. Just like in the following image:

(slide)

Every fold produces a double-fold of interior and exterior, a folded landscape that blurs the boundaries of inside and outside vision. Does it matter if these images correspond with a materialized outside? Or do they rather describe an inside, an introspective, a projected ground upon which each single imagination draws its own district?

(blank)

In the inner district of imagination linger images that might have been taken in the outside, at a specific time of the year, in a specific light; still, if we look at them now, the outside is out of reach – we might as well take them as images of a dream about strange forms of life.

Slideshow in Berlin, April 2

Slideshow in Oporto, November 8

DES HOMMES QU'ON APPELLE SAUVAGE

"Did the mask belong to Jean in the same way it belonged to the dancers in their village who received the sprits when turning around to the rhythmic sounds?

(SLIDE)

Jean used it during the day when he was close to the others, it was as if he needed their presence become another, to enter the ritual of his totem, his spirit. But which kind of spirit was it that Jean received when he put on his black mask that would cover half of his face while his lips were pressed onto each other in eager suspension?"
(Extract of Slideshow for Oporto, November 7)

Invitation to a Slideshow in Oporto

Imaginary Snapshots meet "Wunschmaschine"

The slideshow about places and encounters in European "culturescape" turns into a (self-)experiment: What kind of "Wunschmaschine" (machine of desire) is needed to measure the optimal "cognitive distance" between image and memory, performer and public? How can I turn an ephemeral slideshow into the ultimate "knowledge spill-over"?

(Performed at Salonmarathon, Ballhaus Ost Berlin, on October 23, 2008)

Slideshow in Berlin, October 23

Upcoming performance on Oktober 23 in Ballhaus Ost Berlin, only three days to go...

That's what I am writing on right now:

Hier sind wir im Hafengebiet Antwerpens, das eigentlich nicht bewohnbar ist, wegen der chemischen Belastung. Trotzdem ist im Obergeschoss des großen Backsteinhauses Licht. Hier hat früher der Schleusenwärter gewohnt. Nun wird die Schleuse, über die im Bild eine Brücke führt, automatisch betrieben und so konnte das Haus in eine Künstlerresidency umgewandelt werden, denn Künstler sind ja mobil und dadurch temporär mit Giftstoffen belastbar. Eine Künstlerin, die im oberen Stockwerk wohnt, zeigt gerade, über welche Hindernisse sie geklettert ist, um eine gerade Linie zu beschreiben.
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Dieses Studio gehört derselben Künstlerin, allerdings nur temporär, den sie nimmt an einem zweijährigen Programm der JanvanEyckakademie in Maastricht teil. An diesem Bild sind nicht so sehr die verstreuten Bücher auf dem Boden oder das rote Schlafsofa interessant, das den halben Raum einnimmt, als vielmehr die merkwürdigen Geräusche, die durch die rechte Seitenwand dringen. Es handelt sich, wie ich später erfahre, um Proben für einen Auftritt des Gemüseorchesters.
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Hier sieht man die vier Performer des Gemüseorchesters, mit einer angeschlossenen Kartoffel und einigen Mischpulten und Verstärkern. Auf dem langgezogenen Balkon im Hintergrund befinden sich Umkleidekabinen des ehemaligen Schwimmbads, in dem das Konzert stattfindet, die Kacheln hinter den Musikern gehören zum Schwimmbecken, die Atemwölkchen zeigen die ungefähre Temparatur des Innenraumes an einem Brüsseler Novemberabend an.

Lecture Performance

“As the description of your own body cannot be distinguished from your bodiliy sensation, notes of a journey are automatically body notes with landscapes being absorbed into your body and finally turned into the body of a map. Maps could not come into being without physical movement and time, though in the end they do not depict neither movement nor time. Actually they are hiding much more than what they are showing…”
On Incorrect Maps and Imaginative Snapshots, held in Nextart, project space in Lisbon, Spring 2005

Imaginary Snapshots - New Shots

“I decided to leave behind my camera and only take imaginative snapshots. Later on friends called me crazy when hearing that I had traveled to all these places, Brussels, Gent, Maastricht, Lisbon, Porto, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Helsinki, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Prague, and also places they had never heard of like Palanga, Montemor-o-Novo, Inari, Pärnu, Kaunas, Liepaja, Pyhäjärvi, without taking any photos. I mentioned a rather practical reasen. Imaginative Snapshots are easier to carry. In fact I believe in slides without image or spoken words without recording more than in what is visible and proofable – because of their moment of appearance – their presence, in the centre always a blind spot, as presence itself cannot be grasped – and the search for traces afterwards, on the blank screen, in the auditorium. Let’s have a look…”

Incorrect Maps and Imaginary Snapshots

started in November 2003 as part of my research dealing with transdisciplinary projects in the area of arts, politics and public space in Europe. While traveling through different areas of Europe, capital cities as well as “peripheries”, visiting projects, spaces, interviewing artists and producers, the research got focused on dynamics in developing projects and communicating between different artistic and cultural fields in an informal network, that surpasses national and institutional borders.

This network does not exist as static structure but rather as a way of interaction and communication between different agents in cultural field, which is marked by flexible exchange, alliance and support in (co)production. In a combination of face-to-face encounter and communication via internet shifting “points communes” on a map of culturescape are created, mingling positions and processes that were formerly divided (like artist/publisher/sociologist, actor/choreograph/researcher).

Not only in geographical respect but also in terms of roles and positions Europe’s map is reshaped, borders between areas are blurred and new systems of inclusion and exclusion come into being, depending on the radius of background, experience and facility.

The facts that more and more artists/agents are getting access to, participating in and navigating through Europe’s network-based culturescape has a strong impact on the role and fields of activities of artists as well as on structure and aesthetics of projects that are reflecting a transnational and transdisciplinar way of working and living in Europe. “Artists-in-residency”, co-productions in festivals and organizations, virtual offices that offer supporting structure for projects in different countries, the fusion of virtual and public space in architecture and urban movements are pointing towards a tendency of translocality. On the other hand a strong focus on community and local situation leads into a “grounded” vision of arts and culture.

Different from former movements towards “neighborhoods and streets” or (perfomative and other) experiments of the 60s and 70s this vision has its sources not in a (political) countermovement, not (only) in critic of institutions, but in an reflective process of questioning situations of work and living in different (artistic, urban, political) circuits and creating answers within these circuits.

My answer is also navigating between different circuits, the academic, artistic, sociological and geographical one, as I am using different formats to deal with the subject (the thesis, texts for magazines and presentations, lecture performances, hand drawn maps as visualization and informal guides), following the dynamics of encounters and spontaneous collaborations in the networks I am doing research about.

Rather than objectifying results I try to work with intuitive yet reflective answers to the situations I find during my stay in different countries. In this respect I am part of the research itself - and of the map that has to be incorrect, because it may change its focus and range with every interaction and distribution; of snapshots that have to be imaginary as they consists of “points specials” and “points communes” which have too many layers for being put into a two-dimensional format; of encyclopedias that have to be incomplete because they are dealing with an endless amount of ways how to enter cultural regions and use the dynamics of “grounded” projects within a translocal frame of action.