by Alexandra Pâzgu

Imagetanz – a dance, coreography and performance festival is taking place yearly at Brut Vienna http://www.brut-wien.at/brutproduktion/aktuell/en/

This year’s festival was curated by Katalin Erdödi and included under the umbrella of Care the the premiere of the ongoing action: „Delicate Instruments Handled With Care”, concept by Alexandra Pirici, with Manuel Pelmuş, Mădălina Dan, Mihai Mihalcea and Alexnadra Pirici, lights and photo documentation by Andrei Dinu.

The performance was presented in the last three days of the festival (20,21,22 March) and was followed by a closing party, where Pirici also performed as a musician with her stage name: Adda Kaleh https://soundcloud.com/ama-diver

Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş represented Romania at the 55th edition of the Venice  with the ongoing action “An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale”. In 2014 she has been commissioned for a new work for the Public Programm of Manifesta 10.

Alexandra Pirici – “Delicate instruments handled with care”, enactment of Beyonce’s Drunk in Love video

After viewing and participating in the performance, I thought that the best way to vizualise what happened, was to have a written interview with Alexandra Pirici, the one who proposed the concept and coordinated the performance.

Public

Q: On a formal level, we may say that the public is deciding the dramaturgy of the performance by choosing a title/theme that they would like to see. I say formal, but maybe I should better use “conceptual”- implying that the public’s choice is a validation of the reenactment, re-creating the political situation that allows “iconic moments” to exist. How would you define the public’s role in the whole event- on a conceptual and physical level? (To what degree is the public’s participation a physical influence on the act of performing?)

Alexandra: The work was created for the context of Imagetanz festival in brut, Vienna and the curatorial frame had to do with “care” so I was also thinking of how to respond to the frame. The fact that the audience “orders” or chooses what they like to see has layered potentialities, for me. I do want them to feel “cared for” and entertained (I don’t shy away from the word, I find the concept of “counterculture” slightly dated) and I do want us, as performers, to make ourselves available for their requests. It also has to do with a more contemporary dynamic of accessing information, one that is more related to an internet-like dynamic (where you’re more encouraged to search for things) than to the general convention of theatre performance or older media in which you are assigned a more passive role. And of course I also think of this situation as potentially subversive, in regard to the power relations that implicitly arise – how the public understands this contract – and how the situation plays on the public, what is remembered and what not, how expectations get fulfilled or not. On a physical level I also like the fact that we merge with the audience, that things are sometimes very fragile and if you haven’t been following you can’t really tell if that person next to you is actually performing something or is just part of the audience. I also think not so many proposals consider how the given structure of the theatre space constructs a specific subjectivity and encourages you to conform. People are seated all together, the lights go off and that’s it, you have to watch what you are being presented until the end (so you must be seduced into that), if you would actually like to go out it looks like you make a strong statement against the play, you stand up, you bother everybody, you draw attention to yourself. I wanted a frame that would be as open as possible – I tried to reduce the given structure of the theatre space to the minimum, there are no tribunes, people can move as they like and can come and go as they please. And of course, if there is no audience to ask for enactments, the work doesn’t exist.

Q.: Did the public react in the way you expected to your proposals? Did you have any big surprises?

Alexandra: I think people react differently, for some it’s very easy to ask for things, others prefer to observe. Either way, you get something. There was only one person who actually tried to “compose” with the enactments we had to offer and asked for two in a row. I thought this would happen more but since it’s not pointed out that you can do that, maybe you don’t think that you can. We are also trying to work with the situations that arise and make the most out of them so I think it’s nice when some things happen simultaneously and different readings are created in the mix. There was this one moment when someone was performing Bolivian president Evo Morales shining the shoes of someone and another performer was delivering Bill Clinton’s apology to the nation speech – for his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, and that was a nice coincidence, for example.

Then thinking of what this kind of dynamic produces and what it can reveal, the audience “ordering” things, there was also this situation during the last night, I enact a Beyonce video, it’s probably one of the most “entertaining” enactments and some people came especially to ask for that. I performed it a few times but then towards the end I refused to perform it anymore and someone got frustrated and asked why can’t they see it if it’s on the list, was it because I was tired? And I said “yes” and I was very tired and felt like I was entitled to say no, especially for that particular enactment. It ended there but I think that’s when it started to get interesting J – just to clarify the context, the work has three hours to be experienced and we programmed it for three days in a row. And we also play with these expectations, some moments can actually deliver, from a “spectacular” point of view, others totally don’t and I like that mix.

Irony

Q.: The proposal of embodying “iconic moments” from the western collective memory is also a claim for a common ground, an agreement, of what is iconic. However, its realization is depending on your own bodies and identities – which rely on subjectivity. I felt that your proposals have been mainly guided by irony. What would you say on this topic? Did you consciously and programmatically use this concept, or is it something that turned out that way?

Alexandra: As a start, we didn’t want to perform iconic moments from western collective memory but indeed, most of the situations belong to the western culture. I was aware of that and I didn’t really try to look for a balance because in a way this is also relevant, the reality of our common, westernized memory, it would have made no sense to try and correct it. Most of the things that came to our minds belonged to the western culture and I think this is beyond critique – it might be more interesting to think of why is that or how western culture had the ability to capture a lot that was non-western. But there are quite a few proposals that are different also and you can spot them on the list.

As for the irony: I think enactment is an implicit ironic commentary, to some extent. In extension to the collaboration with Manuel Pelmus for the Venice biennale, the focus here shifted on performative situations – as the context was also different, the theatre space is dominated by a very different history and function. I was more interested in bringing real-life actions and situations in the theatre context and see how this frames them, what it reveals about them, how it deconstructs them. And irony played an important part, of course, for me, when smartly done, it’s an important critical tool.

Alexandra Pirici, “Delicate Instruments handled with care”, enactment of Osama Bin Laden’s killing”.

Q.: Do you find irony an inspiring concept? What are its flaws and its gains? Do you use it in your practice? If yes,  how? Please give examples.

Alexandra: Yes, I find irony a very inspiring concept. As I said, I think it has a great critical potential when performed intelligently and I do try to use it in my practice. For some moments of the work in brut it might have been too much but I think you also need this shifting between more subtle and more obvious choices.

I am interested in detournement and overidentification, as strategies. The first intervention I did in public space was in 2010, I think, and I proposed an enactment/ embodiment of “Caragialiana”, this horrendous and very expensive figurative statuary group in front of the National Theatre in Bucharest. Public monuments and monumental art seemed to be the only legitimate and supported art form so we claimed to be doing the same thing. And of course, the difference in scale and the gap between the image created by our living bodies trying to mimic the construction and the construction itself produced something interesting, ironic and critical, in my opinion, without being a direct and obvious attack.

The drawbacks are the same as always: our subjective readings of everything. What I find subtle and ironic someone else might find totally boring. We’ll have to live with that – and of course, to try and make things as accessible as we can and to better understand what we produce.

Alexandra Pirici & Manuel Pelmus, “An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, enactment of Joseph Beuys, “Tramstop. A Monument to the Future”

Critical thinking

Q.: A friend asked me in what way is your performance relevant to critical thinking. I answered without hesitation: it is relevant because it transforms the body in a critical tool of questioning the collective imagination. (Do you agree? Why? Why not?); or do you rather link this performance (and your practice, if you want) to a sort of institutional critique that reaffirms the body as a valid subjectivity, a tool of deconstruction?!

Alexandra: I agree with both readings, I am not keen to correct or re-enforce any of them.

Performance Art and political representation

Q.: How far is the project a questioning or a critique of the capitalist society and the commodification of images?

Alexandra: To be totally honest, framing your work as “political” or critical of the capitalist society became such an easy thing to do, like taking shelter under an umbrella that could cover any lack of thought or actual conceptual work. It can be both ineffective and easy to appropriate. The work of the likes of Hans Haacke is very rare, mostly I come across very blunt and dry statements so, depending on the context, I sometimes refrain from emphasizing on this.  But I think I can point out a thread of thought in relation to your question: I have the feeling that you can reclaim reality (of your body) over the simulacra through this conscious enactment of models or images that construct the fabric of our lives, our hyper reality. I think there is some potential there, when you see the human performing the simulation, the imperfection interferes with your projection of what it should be and how you knew it looked like from your mediated experience of that “object”. I think that could be an interesting area of research.

Q: What is your favorite point/scene/theme: why?

Alexandra: I wouldn’t name one – we all brought in material and I think all stuff is interesting from one point of view or another.

Duration

Q.: Are duration and the inherent repetition of specific themes contributing to your idea of how a theme/subject should be performed? I mean, taking into consideration the fact that you will be performing in Bucharest in June, do you consider changing some scenes?

Alexandra: I think some enactments will be different, for the first “free national television broadcast during the Romanian Revolution of 1989” I was translating in real-time to the audience (as the performers were speaking in Romanian) and of course this makes for a different experience but I think both (the mediated/translated one in a foreign country and the un-mediated one in Romania) are valid. As for the repetition: I am looking for potential directions to develop within this practice of enactment, different threads to follow and a better understanding of what it could produce under different circumstances so in that sense I think the work is still in process but also on a more general level, not only referring to this particular piece.

Collaboration

Q.: Is there a way in which you would define your collaboration? What did you discover about each other? What would be worth developing in future projects?

Alexandra: We had a lot of fun. And it was interesting to see what each of us remembered or believed to be relevant, in one way or another, about our experience with “culture” at large. Of course it’s not a comprehensive overview and I would point out a work a like a lot and I would use as a reference – Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s “Suddenly this overview”. I love the low-key and the apparent, misleading “superficiality” of it that made for one of the most amusing yet touching experiences of an artwork.

Inspiration

Q: What would you say is your source of inspiration at the moment? (Perhaps you could name some artists, books, cities, places, words, concepts etc.)

Alexandra: I can’t do that, for everything I name there are so many other names that I forget that it makes it really frustrating afterwards.

Theory in Praxis

Q.: What is the question that would best describe your practice and your interest in art?

Alexandra: I make work for the theatre space more and more rarely and most of the future projects will happen in visual arts contexts. So at the moment, since I’m not so fond of self-precarization and the recent interest (from big visual art institutions) in performance/live art as a mere “event” and cheap advertisement within the economy of attention, the “question of the day” would be: can we work a decent budget? So besides the artistic points, I’m also interested in art as a way to make a living – and talking about that should not make you less interested in your art. This is a common exploitation strategy, I was once told I should work for free if I actually loved what I do. The body is not “cheap” and is not subverting the objected-oriented art market by not getting paid.

Thank you.

Alexandra Pâzgu for Inhalemag  02.04.2014

http://alexandra-pazgu.flavors.me/

http://inhalemag.com/category/contributors/alexandra-pazgu/

The post 10+1 QUESTIONS TO BE HANDLED WITH CARE – INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDRA PIRICI appeared first on INHALE MAG.

The exhibitions include three different approaches on conceptual art and the way it has been exhibited and curated during the Foundation’s 25 years of existence. Against Method is temporally, the last of the three exhibitions, curated by Gertrud Sandqvist.

The title comes from Paul Karl Feyerabend’s acclaimed book Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (1975), where the author claims that science would make good use of theoretical anarchy. Critique is brought to methodological monism and to the assumed strictness of scientific methods. The curatorial concept is linked to the ironical phrase used by Feyerabend in the end of the book: “anything goes”. Anything goes – in the sense that Sol Lewitt also explained in his Sentences on Conceptual Art: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”[1] The exhibition is a joyful presentation of pieces dating from the seventies, a period in which video art gained great popularity between artists, becoming for some the necessary tool of expression: video art – regarded as the most appropriate medium to express immateriality, video art – used as a medium of communication not as an artistic object in itself.

The exhibition is structured with the help of concepts like The Retinal, Identity/Body, Gesture, and Transgression. The highlight is on conceptual art from the late sixties and seventies and the different media one had used in order to make new ideas visible.

Lamelas’s Gente di Milano (1970) was probably one of the pioneering works that introduced the idea of a surveillance camera. The piece implies a camera fixed in a street corner in Milano. Through the mechanical gaze, the author is gaining spatial property. The view is singular, and attested by snapshots of the people passing by. The final piece includes the film installation reproducing the filmed images from the seventies, and eleven black-and-white printed photographs indicating the exact time when the picture was taken. A piece that questions the art object as being central to the viewer’s interest and transgresses the interest onto the process of looking. Is the act of looking a way of changing reality? Lamelas’s piece is a good reminder of this question.

Exhibition view: Against Method, Generali Foundation, 2013. Photo: Margherita Spiluttin
foundation.generali.at

Elective Affinities/The Truth of Masks and Tables of Affinities is a great example of using art as a method of interpretation and analyses and reflexion of past events. I loved this piece for its capacity to express the reflexive characteristic of conceptual art, not only its quest for originality. One of the claims of the emerging conceptual artists, in the seventies, was the commercialization and objectification of art. This doesn’t mean that conceptual art an immaterial art is, but rather that conceptual art uses expression as a reflection, as a proof of a process of thought, without aiming to produce an aesthetic experience. Torf’s installation includes 14 tables with a lamp, comprising the information of a book in making – probably Walter Benjamin’s never finished book, on which he worked more than seventeen years and never completed. Secondly, the installation comprises a series of photography that have in the center a person reading a book. We can’t see the face of the reader, only the covers of the book he/she is reading: Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809); Oscar Wilde’s The Truth of Masks (1891), Benjamin’s German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters (1936); Arendt’s Men in Dark Times. The third component of the installation consists in slide projections on two free standing projection walls. The projection is a loop of pictures of a man and a woman standing alone, each on a wall. Every change of picture shows the same couple dressed differently.

Exhibition view: Against Method, Generali Foundation, 2013. Photo: Margherita Spiluttin
foundation.generali.at

The objective of this action: to re-enact Goethe’s concept of elective affinities and demasque marriage as a failure scenario consisting in role-play and routine. Torf’s installation is the incorporation of thought that emerges when a critical theorist uses a classical text in order to discuss the status of marriage in contemporary society. Torf not only shows this process of revisiting culture but she makes a further step by transgressing from reflection to action. The projection of the couple is Torf’s own interpretation of the elective affinities. The final objective is the visualization of a process of thought plus the application of the observed. What Torf does is to create a relation of interchangeability between object and viewer. The dynamic of the piece happens in the relation between the viewer-viewed: the artist – as reader of past processes, the readable object- a document of the process, the process of viewing – objectified, the viewer himself is not only a reader but also a potential creator, a visionary and promoter of the idea.

Exhibition view: Against Method, Generali Foundation, 2013. Photo: Margherita Spiluttin
foundation.generali.at

The same aspect of looking and being looked at is trapped in the works of Lamelas with Gente di Milano, and in Zobering’s work Video nr. 5(1991).  Zobering’s video is a loop showing the artist on his knee, with a rifle in his hand, leaning towards a window, ready to shoot. We can hear the sound of the rifle releasing the safety catch and the pop of champagne corks. Zobering’s short film is a visual demonstration of Benjamin’s comparison between a photographer and a hunter (see Short History of Photography 1931).Dan Graham’s Body Press (1970-1972) is a film projected on two opposite walls, showing the a man and a woman while filming each other. As mentioned in the presentation paper, the piece is a study of identity. Identity is defined not only through the camera’s eye, which is a tool in the viewer’s hand, but it is also a question of trust between the two holders of the camera. At some point they also change the cameras, the viewing perspectives are changed. As a spectator you are trapped between the two walls with the projections of the two subjects who film and are being filmed simultaneously. On the right wall you see the woman filming. On the left wall you see the man filming.  Graham superposes the camera’s filming perspective with the looking perspective of the viewer. The camera is integrated into the relation viewer-viewed, and becomes not only a documentation tool but the subject of the view. The dramaturgy of the installation relies on the camera’s subject. The viewer’s reading experience is perfomative in the sense of actually having to choose on which wall to look. It doesn’t matter where you take it from, the experience is a mirroring game.

Check out this 1994 interview with the artist in Bombmagazine: http://bombsite.com/issues/46/articles/1722

More about Dan Graham’s work at: http://artpulsemagazine.com/words-mirrors-dan-graham-beyond

Other artists like Mary Kelly, Hans Haacke are present in the exhibition with works that offer a conceptual reflection upon biological and organic processes. Lili Dujourie uses the camera as a tool of empowering the viewed subject. Her series Hommage a…are all essays of deconstructing the relation of power- and subordination that usually gets installed between a viewer and the viewer. Marta’s Rosler video Semitotics of the Kitchen, 1975, is a great delight. Here is a performer with a intelligent sense of humour, a piece that speaks about the objectification of women, a critique of a society of spectacle, where reality is being shaped by media. Rosler’s piece shows the artist in a kitchen, explaining the use of kitchen tools, in a mechanical and performative way. The piece is also a critique of culinary TV shows.

The exhibition includes also pieces from 21th century, like Andrea Fraser’s piece Untitled, 2003, a video recording of the artist and a collector in a hotel room, naked, in a bed. The concept is one of destabilization of the relationship between artist and collector, which is often seen as a prostitute and client relation. The artist spent one night with a collector, who bought the first videotapes out of five. The power relationship between artist and collector been redefined when the artists sold the tape nr.2 to the museum of Generali Foundation. In the process of doing and selling art, the artist regains her rights as she is the producer, the seller, and the sold.

Andrea Fraser, Untitled, 2003
photo old.likeyou.com

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My third contribution on the KFDS is reserved for discussing one of the most inspirationally and avant-gardist piece I have experienced in Brussels this year.

Traditional art has used us with liking or disliking what we see. Few years ago we would go to a performance/show and expect a nice story, well defined characters, an evolution/involution of one of the main hero’s and a tear drop or a hair raise on our left or right hand – all proofs that the show has invested us with some kind of aesthetical appreciation.

It is hardly the case of the performance art going on today. And it is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Things stand.

As art historian Boris Groys argues in his revelatory Introduction; Global Conceptualism Revisited[1] : Conceptual Art comes with a shift of paradigm in terms of spectatorship; viewing art transgressed from aesthetics to poetics and rhetoric. In other words, art is not supposed to be presented as a nicely wrapped present meant to tickle the spectator’s senses, but has become a tool for communication, transforming the art object into a channel, disputed by both artist and spectator. Spectatorship has enriched its de-codifying role by the participatory feature of creating sense simultaneously with the artist. Translated into practice, this doesn’t imply forcing spectators to intervene into shows; neither does it mean that the creating subject is sitting between the spectators. The perspective is a philosophical and a dramaturgical one. The contemporary paradigm explores the Society as Spectacle and transforms everyone in viewers. The performer becomes a journalist who is reporting on his subject of matter- this may be real or fictive.

“Institute for Human Activities ON THE INSTITUTE OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES”[2] is a performance lecture about a Belgian based kind-of-art-kind-of-sociological institute that developed a long term artistic project in Congo. The lecture is a presentation of the institute’s activity in Congo, from the first steps of the project (buying land on a plantation, doing studies, interviews with the locals) to its inaugural activities (group activities, a conference, skype interview with scholars on the matter of gentrification[3]). The main performer acts as the artistic president and the communication agent of the institute, his role being to inform the public in Brussels about the institute’s philosophy and activity.

photo artnews.org

The performance respects a lecture’s protocol, by investing a speaker with a subject to report on, by the use of rhetoric, and also by documentation the verbal and gestural discourse of the speaker with visual proofs (slide show presentation). As in a typical scenario for a lecture, the public is asked for its feedback on the matter of doing an artistic project in an underdeveloped country with the aim of creating an economy around it. On a long run, this artistic centre this artistic center is a creative space for the locals, who will be offered support to “create” art objects that will be sold on the Western art market, with the specification that the money will come back to the locals and in this way start an economic bubble around the centre. Furthermore, when extended, the centre will offer summer residencies for western emerging artists. One of my friends was so seduced with the idea of the project that he asked the performer Renzo Martens what conditions the participation to such a residency would imply.

After leaving the performance, outside the Wiels[4] people started to murmur about this amazing idea of creating economy by artistic means in low developed countries. Just like art could save the world and this would be possible – here is the example, “IFA” is doing it! Righttttttttt… “how come we Romanians didn’t think of it before?” “Of course, we didn’t we are at least 20 years behind all artistic thought and practice happening in Europe.

photo 24.media.tumblr.com

Towards a synchronisation. In thought, at least….

By means of this article, I hope to start up a discussion upon ways of creating fiction and structures for telling stories. More and more people start to doubt the fact that media presents an undistorted image of reality- using the tools of journalism; media is supposed to present facts not to represent interests. Still, when seen at TV things seem real, people hardly doubt the veridicity of the information they are receiving. Contrary, when going to the theatre, people believe everything because they accept to be part of the convention where fictional facts are presented in order to make us feel connected to each other by the universalism that bounds all living souls on this extremely crowded planet. What happens when, the presented material doesn’t deal with feelings – as “IFA” does, but with questions? What happens when fictional structures are substituted by documentation/research tools (report, lecture, presentation)?  Does art become political? Does politics become art? Maybe that all this questions should quit the dialectical perspective of or/or and should be regarded as proofs of the rise of a new paradigm in art. In today’s Society of Spectacle[5], what is real and what is fiction?

photo 2003-2008.telic.info

Creators of “IFA” seem to be very familiar with these questions, since they are actively using a serious, informative, scientific language to create FICTION. What kind of fiction? It doesn’t matter. Society is demanding this days that art should talk about community[6], all art is political nowadays…well, be it! “IFA” talks about political economy. Is it really? Or is the subject of the economisation of the art and the scientific language only used as tools to speak about the politisation of the art?! But this is less important. What counts is that by means of a subject of interest, art created a debate around DISCOURSE! As Groys stated: ART has shifted from AESTHETICS to RETHORIC.

No actual proof of the existence of the “IFA” artistic centre in Congo, has been found. Still, spectators continue the debate about the power of art to improve economy or even the world’s order. What can be more poetical than an engaged community of spectators who sincerely believe that art can save the world?!

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She She Pop- “Schubladen”

She She Pop is a Berlin based performance group, formed mainly by female members: Sebastian Bark, Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Ilia Papatheodorou and Berit Stumpf .

“Schubladen” – is a meeting between former East and West german female residents, confrontating each other, their lives, their education and the society they were brought up. Biographical elements are inserted in the collective history of the last 40 years.

“Schubladen” is a performative encounter of different destinies, all being presented, compared and opposed on stage. There is no good or bad, no right or wrong. Events are regarded with humour and intelligence.

The show is structured as a repetition of confrontations. Sitting face to face, two by two, the 6 participants explore their pasts and bring a personal interpretation to the known historical facts, a catwalk of imagined and reimagined clichés that people have about each other. The conclusion: creating a dialog between opposite sites. Does it work? Can we change who we are if we cannot change the past? Is the past totally defining our lives? The question is to be answered by our personal choises.

Read more on She She Pop’s site: http://www.sheshepop.de/en/productions/schubladen.html

Foto: Katrin Ribbe

www.sheshepop.de

www.sheshepop.de

Mette Edvardsen

“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine”

The Royal Library of Belgium has hosted the utopia described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. In a future far far away all the books are burnt and the only way to support knowledge is by becoming yourself a book. So why not try it out before the disappearance of books?! Following Mette Edvardson’s concept, a group of artists from all over the world, have started to learn books by hard and to become the book they love. There are already 30 live books(in German, English, Spanish, Arabic, Norwegian, Greek, Dutch), one of them I met this year in Brussels.

photo bellyflopmag.com

He was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He took me somewhere in one of the library’s archive and started talking. It was a weird feeling, the book was not an object anymore but a person. The book was embodied by this middle aged man who had no biography for me. He became the story; without trying to add extra feelings to what he was saying or to set a scenery or to make it theatrical. No, it was just the two of us and the story, and the words, the language, the texture of fiction.

More about the project and about the coregrapher and performer Mette Edvardsen: http://www.metteedvardsen.be/projects/thfaitas.html

by Alexandra Pâzgu

Alexandra Pâzgu is an artistic researcher and practitioner, interested in contemporary dramaturgical dynamics. Currently enrolled in an artistic based Ph.D.  at UBB Cluj, with a proposal that links dramaturgy to conceptual art.

http://flavors.me/alexandra_pazgu

The post KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS 2013 UNDER THE SIGN OF PUBLIC DEBATE – A VIEWER’S DIARY – PART 2 appeared first on INHALE MAG.

I.

Sanja Mitrovic’s performance Speak is designed as a speech contest between the artist and fellow performer Geert Vaes. Famous speeches are reenacted by the performers with the purpose of reinterpreting the text and the meaning of the discourse without taking into consideration the original context.

World-known speeches are opposed, some examples include Barak Obama’s A New Beginning, Egypt June 4, 2009; Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam, NY, April 4, 1967; Adolf Hitler, Speech on Foreign Policy, Reichstag, Berlin, January 30, 1937; Vlaclav Havel, The Future of Hope Conference, Hiroshima, December 5, 1996; Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms, Washington, December 6, 1941 etc.

photo sanjamitrovic.com

The spectator is confronted with one speech at a time, and after each round he has to vote for his favorite speech. The difficulty arises when trying to define the reasons of voting: what do you choose when you vote? Does your vote go to your favorite speech or to your favorite performer? Or do you choose for how a speech has been performed?

The performers are not only playing a historian’s role, but become also the creators of new meanings for old speeches, due to their personal interpretation and subjective way of performing.

Speak incorporates an ambitious urge of debating around the theme of political speeches, but ends up presenting the obvious theatricality of speeches and fails in addressing a political question towards art or an artistic question towards politics. Nevertheless, it’s worth seeing it, it may disturb you!

http://vimeo.com/66479150

II.

The most tonic/vivid and yet reflective performance, mixing the borders of possibility and potentiality in performance art, was Antonia Baehr’s performance Abecedarium Bestiarium CREATION- Portraits of affinities in animal metaphors.

The performance consists of multiple stops each revealing a letter that names an extinct animal or a crypto zoological element. The script for each mini performance was written at the artist’s demand by friends or acquaintances.

photo kampnagel.de

The sum of the mini performances creates a fictional alphabet of mystical animals: the Dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger, the Mermaid, the Dolphin etc. By enacting the words and actions from the scripts, the performer accomplishes a panoply of endangered human features. Each performance is different because every time the performer chooses different letters. Here are some examples:

The horses: the relationship between two good friends, who painted horses when they were young and for whom the Art school becomes the main reason for not painting horses anymore. The story is told by visual means. The performer is handling a video projector and manipulating different images and drawings of horses to create action and a story. Poetical, sentimental, graphic.

photo kampnagel.de

The cat – the limit between tenderness and aggressiveness, between domesticity and wildness. The performer is using her body, gets undress and finally uses her breasts as puppets on table. Provocative, asexual, groovy.

The mermaid: a sound intervention that reproduces mermaid language, that is created in front of the spectator’s eyes and ears by mixing different old tapes, registration and voice overs. Imaginative. Nostalgic. Vulnerable.

To sum up, Antonia Baehr’s (in German read bear) is recreating in her Abecedarium a selection of extinct features that are represented by archaic animals but that are actually part of our spiritual human mythologies. Untraceable characteristics are made visible by the invisible means of performance art. Is this art? The question is addressed with every gesture of the performer, and every time the answer is suspended between: 1. Who cares as long as you love it, 2. Of course it is art – look how far it’s going, 3.It’s so simple and yet so complex 4. As long as it makes the invisible- visible- it.is.art.

photo kampnagel.de

photo ausland-berlin.de

by Alexandra Pâzgu

Alexandra Pâzgu is an artistic researcher and practitioner, interested in contemporary dramaturgical dynamics. Currently enrolled in an artistic based Ph.D.  at UBB Cluj, with a proposal that links dramaturgy to conceptual art.

http://flavors.me/alexandra_pazgu

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