Clara draft
Title I been so fucking angry; I read books and got cravings.
Relation to previous practice
The most of my BA works was made as a reaction to the academy I was at, which had a focus on craft and the textile material. My frustration mostly sprang from a lack of conceptual emphasis and the unwillingness to even go near that subject. Starting at the Piet Zwart I realized have that frustration as a driving force anymore. The was intellectually stimulated by the seminars, I felt that I got philosophically and theoretically challenged, and meet people that were interested in having conversations with me about the things that I was dwelling on. The paradox though, was that this put me in a position where I felt distanced from my creativity and confused about how to create. Along with this, my stress problems were an important factor, I sought methods to manage this half a year before coming to Holland. This has also had changed my may of going around things and my making. My time here has therefore partly been an education in learning how to make work when I have nothing to kick against and trying not go get stressed out.
It has been attempt to discover new tools and methods that could function as a motor in my process. I re-discovered reading, writing a started a working journal, to see a context between my research interests; together with Raluca and Madison I set up a collaboration focusing on using performance and intervention as a research method. This involves physically trying out ideas, improvising performances, thinking with our bodies. These experiments have been a way for me to work towards one of the aims I had when coming to Piet Zwart: to establish awareness towards the context my projects operate within, art theory and make my concepts clearer.
Breaking with the craft-based ideology at my BA program, I started to work with performance and interventions in public space. This in turn led me toward an interest in what the movements and non-verbal communication in that act communicates and how it creates a discourse. Also with documenting those experiments, I came in contact with moving images, which appealed to me because it felt more immaterial <provided more options, freed me immaterial state< then textiles.
In my project Air is a Great Transmitter of Information those two interest are highly visible. The video consists of fragments of a re-staging of a youtube dance course, in which people are taught how to execute a ballroom swing. The re-enactment is performed by two older women and between their bodies a gap is created which a non- verbal dialog takes place. This is intensified by the slow motion pace of the footage and its silence. With this work I wants to raise questions and generate a conversation about the politics of ownership of one’s own body, the complex relation to forces, obedience and trust. The work is a search for where this power of ownership lies, what this consists of and contains.
My video Game is a single channel video that views six people playing a game on wood logs in which the object is not to touch the ground. The logs are placed in a circle with enough space in between to crate a difficulty for the people to move around on them. The performers need to negotiate and collaborate with each other to find a way to move around on them in a clockwise turn. As the game goes on, an exploration of the structure of the movements accrues, but also in the verbal communication and language is started to play with. By making this video, together by influences from the seminar on performativity, my attention was drawn towards the dialog and how it triggered and changed the physical activity which I found very interesting.
In the project 8e is a documentation and a documentary of a re-enactment of a gym class and a dance routine that were taught at my secondary school in Sweden. Now re-enacted by my old classmates, my old gym teacher and me at our old gym hall. The project was first based on the act of movements mediated my muscle memory, but in studio visits and by reading Stella Bruzzi’s Perofrmative Documentary in the performativity seminar, gave me the realization that project had a more complex context then just movements, I was dealing with history, feelings, memories, possible traumas, gossip and so on. In the studio visits I got questioned concerning my lack of awareness of its complexity. And in her book Bruzzie writes about how re-enactment is practised as a way to understand history, the difficulties of achieving authenticity and how it becomes a performed truth. It made me try to work with the ideas more before executing it, but I guess that I ended up like many times before re- conceptualizing, this time just before I executed it. What the work did for me though was again giving me this act of performativity, speech related to movements. And back again.
Doppelgänger.
Research strands
With the experiences the projects has given me, the knowledge that I gained from the seminars, studio visits and my peers, I feel that my work is going through intended mood of change right now. I strive after to push it more, to add more information to it and to find new forms of it My ideas are still often directed towards choreography and the physicality of the human body, but I want to investigate it from different points of view then just its physical expression. To relate it to performativity, re-enactment, live acts, history and collaborations/interactions. Further I also want to draw my work closer to form of conversation, a dialectic discourse and a state of unfinished as in defudes the border of a finished product. I will also spend time to treat work as a essay form, both when it comes to video, performance, physicality and collaborations. To see what that make in a form of an artwork. Important to me though, is to treat all this as a state of flux, to encourage myself to keep on developing my practice and be open to new ways my work might take.
Relation to a larger context
Inspiring to this way of going around my work has among a few things been the If I can’t dance, I am not going to be a part of your revolution-performance in residences in Amsterdam. A group that investigates performance and performativity in a context of contemporary art and I visit their last presentation of a tow year research program with the performativity seminar. Their research was presented through film, performance, lectures and interviews and elements of ongoing was still there, even if it was a presentation.
Irena Botea’s master class at the IFFR has also inspired my thinking and her talk about how she look up on her self as both an artist and an educator. How she dose very political work, but the importance of just making what you think is fun sometimes. She also has an approach to go out an meet people in her work that is appealing to me.
Reading Stella Bruzzi’s book; Perforamtive Documentary and reflect up on her writing about re-enactment and how that can be practiced in a way to understand history but also its difficulties of achieving authencicity thought it and how is becomes a performed truth.
Hanna Arendt
Conclusion I keep on encouraging me that the long way is sometimes a good choice for me and that it will create a better understanding towards what I do. To let me be slow is to create awareness and a confident in my making and thinking. Fore some time though, I have been feeling that I have not just been enrolled in one master in Fine Arts, it has also been an education in English, cultural studies, history, writing, reading, philosophy, ideas history, talking, words, thinking ect. It is first now that I have started to feel more comfortable in all this and finding my ways in it make my confidence within my practice grow. I feel that I am reconnecting with my creativity, my making and my thinking. I have new tools of how to do research, how to build up my ideas and a better awareness my projects works in a context of contemporary art.
I also know now that I can do work without being fucking angry or stress myself out. What is a MASTER in itself and a important realization in my work. The effect of that is that I feel my lust for experimenting, playing and pushing my work returning and but of couse I still have a lot to do still.