Raluca draft

Even from before coming to Piet Zwart, I have been constantly shifting from a desire of engaging with the urban landscape to an interest in generating shared experiences with other people. One of the aspects that have changed in the past months is that instead of looking at these approaches as being completely distinct, I am currently trying to explore common grounds and points of overlap between the two, hoping that by doing so I will reach a point where they could coexist and reinforce one another.

I still feel much more comfortable working with what is already given in the urban setting, mainly because it makes is easier to choose a framework or a pattern among the multiple co-existing ones. Once having the parameters set, it becomes a matter of either imagining other possibilities for the predefined, already embedded readings or of subjectively displacing the normative codes regulating individual behavior in collective spaces such as streets, shops etc. Lately, my approach towards public space has also changed. Instead of trying to define the interventions and actions as fixed and independent works, I have started integrating them into a broader context that allows me to look at them as a perpetually malleable and interlinked research material.

I called this state of fluidity icomein-pieces.

icomein-pieces is a series of online blogs which use as a point of departure my walks around Dutch cities, Rotterdam in particular, and include, among others, mappings of recurrent patterns, estrangement of objects, on-the spot or longer-term interventions. Each work exists as a separate, numbered piece, which then allows me to return to it and update its content with the most recent reiteration of the initial idea, while keeping visible and accessible the entire process. At the same time, this format makes it possible for me to create connections, references and external links between various works that share a certain degree of similarity and to experiment more with the layout of each page. For example, icomein2pieces includes the intervention in which I replaced the Albert Heijn logo from their brochures, their entrance to the shop and products with other images that I have taken and is linked to icomein3pieces, a deux-pieces costume made from a German bier banner.

I hope in time icomein-pieces will become a consistent, subjective, online archive to which I can always return in order to analyze, modify, reinterpret or combine ideas from different layers of time and various points of interests, without denying their potential for continuous development.

This project, as well as various texts analyzing the functions and dynamics of public space opened a different inquiry upon my works – their degree of site-specificity or “relatability” to a certain environment as compared to a rather more general applicability. Though now I see it as an obvious aspect, I didn’t realize before coming to Rotterdam that public space in cities is quite universal and can be understood by using the same parameters and methods of analysis, even if it finds itself in different stages of development. In this sense, I am also looking at my approach less from a perspective of the citizen reclaiming public space – which at the moment I find quite romantic and maybe even naïve – to one in which I try to position myself from the viewpoint of the tourist. If a tourist can be understood as a person temporarily suspended from work and from “home”, deriving pleasure from watching craftsmen, looking for unforgettable experiences, I wonder what an artist as tourist would perceive, imagine, mistake, consume etc.

And I also think these considerations can be extended, to a greater or lesser extent, to the one-on-one experiences.

I started to use the term “experiences” when I realized I don’t actually consider myself to be a performer or to do performance. This might be related to the fact that I have a tendency of rejecting the “eventification” and “hierarchization” usually present while performing, an aspect which became clearer when I was invited to do a performance in December at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. For LUMEN, I took as a starting point the formula for calculating the effective lumens required for determining the performance of a flash light and applied it to the context in which I was finding myself. Performing in darkness, I analyzed the factors present in the formula both from a physician’s perspective, exemplifying them using a mobile flash light and some decorative, fluorescent, small stones, and from the perspective of the performer delivering an effective output during the event. For example, the coefficient of utilization was expressed as the duration of the performance, the ballast factor as the personal triggers for the work (having an audience, being friends with the curators etc). I still don’t know how to approach this work as a whole, because sometimes I think of it as being rather confusing than generative, whereas some other times I see it as a straight, yet poetic analysis of what performing for an audience means to me.

On the whole, I think that in time I became more aware that my interest lies in inter-subjectivity and mediation of affects present in a work either as part of the process or as part of the result than in the confrontation of the audience with a finished work made by the artist. Claire Bishop, in her book Artificial Hells, used the term “shared privatized experiences” when referring to the participatory art made under communism in order to describe “a collective artistic space amongst mutually trusting colleagues”. Though this is not the case with my practice, since coming across these words I have started to look at some of my works as being “privatized shared experiences” – defined by the gesture of creating a private, intimate moment in a shared reality, which does not involve the creation of a special or particular experience in itself, but appeals to a set of conditions of experience that make it function.

One example is The Lunch Series, a project consisting of one-on-one interactions that took place until the present moment in the shared flat I was renting.

They usually involve deciding on a meal, cooking it together and, from time to time, deciding on a set of activities to do in the garden of the flat, which could be accessed only from my room. Each lunch starts with the acceptance of the invitation and develops in accordance with the different discussions and relationship dynamics that occur. Up to this point, the people taking part in it have been my classmates and the activities have ranged from rearranging objects already present in the garden to drawing, clay modeling or simply talking while eating. The project’s aim is not to stick to a strict format, but instead to generate personal experiences from common, daily-life activities. At the same time, it should also function as a non-normative space providing alternative ways of production with no particular focus on form, no pressure of accomplishing an expected outcome.

This project is very strongly connected to another one that I have developed before coming to the Piet, called AA+ : Aerobics meets artist, which involved individual, personalized, approx. one hour long aerobic sessions for artists held in a gym in Bucharest. As any artist could book one, the program was personalized according to the answers provided to an online form that contained questions about their practice, their preferences and everyday struggles. The sessions had a loose script and were mostly based on Augusto Boal’s techniques for improvisation, reciprocity, collaboration and negotiation. Same as with the public space interventions, I used to look at these interpersonal works as having a clear beginning and end. However, because of the conversations I have had with tutors and classmates, I became much more open to experimenting with previous works and their transformative possibilities. After about half a year break from the aerobics, I returned to the piece in order to adjust it for a bigger number of participants and also for a different setup: a van. Even if the event didn’t happen because of organizational problems, I ended up performing exercises for seated passengers in the tram for an audience of two (thank you Tracy for this!).

Rethinking this work for a different context, but also allowing my works in general to exist in a fluid state contribute to seeing my practice as a lifelong research and series of tryouts that encompass everything I do or experience, listen, read or discuss and also the people around me. This is a comforting perspective that comes in a moment when I also feel much more at ease with my own rhythm and pace of working. At the moment, I am looking more deeply into the act of walking not as a means to an end, but an end in itself. I think it plays a major art in the way I develop my thoughts and ideas and also in the way I relate to people and landscapes.

References

Books

Bishop, C. (2012), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso

Dertnig, C. (2014), Performing the Sentence: Research and Teaching in Performative Fine Arts, Sternberg Press

Goldberg, R. (2011), Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (Third Edition), Thames & Hudson

Koster, E., Oeffel T. (1997), High-rise in The Netherlands, Nai Publishers

Maccannell, D. (2013), The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, University of California Press

Van der Meer, H. (2012), The Netherlands - Off the Shelf, YdocPublishing

Articles

Acconci, V. (1990) Public Space in a Private Time, Critical Inquiry, vol. 16, no.4, pp. 900-918

Burgers, J. (2000) Urban landscape: On public space in the post-industrial city, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 145-164

Lagae, J. (2006) Reading Public Space in the ‘Non-Western’ City. A Dialogue between Zeynep Çelik and Wim Cuyvers, OASE, vol. 69, pp. 32-42

von Hantelmann, D. (2014) The Experiential Turn, Walker Living Collections Catalogue, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/performativity/experiential-turn/