Raluca draft

Even from before coming to Piet Zwart, my practice has been constantly shifting from a desire of engaging with the urban landscape to an interest in having shared experiences with other people. One of the aspects that have changed in the past months is that instead of looking at these processes as being two completely distinct ones, I am currently trying to find possible common grounds between the topics and approaches I use when engaging with public space and the environments in which I seek interaction with other people.

A connecting thread is the ongoing interest in the shifting dynamics between private and public readings of either spaces or intersubjective experiences. In a way, I consider that most of my works use as a support structure (to a smaller or larger extent) what I have come to define as “privatized shared experiences”, namely situations in which I relate to someone or something in an intimate manner by choosing to place this type of personal interaction either in the public realm or within everyday, common experiences. Moreover, after attending the talk by David Levine, I realized that most of my works contain a vanishing component, being on the threshold of disappearing or simply remaining invisible for a broader audience than the one directly involved.

However, 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, pubs etc. Lately, mostly because of the conversations I have had with some of the tutors and classmates, I have started to consider my approach towards public space as being a continuously linked one presented as a series of exercises and research materials rather than independent works.

This is why I decided to incorporate them under the umbrella of the icomeinpieces project, which is a personal “street diary” that uses as a starting point my walks around Dutch cities, Rotterdam in particular, and contains mappings of recurrent patterns, estrangement of objects, on-the spot or longer-term interventions and so on. Each work exists as a separate piece of the main project, which then allows me to make connections, links or updates of the work itself and between different ones that use the same approach. 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 (fig.1). icomein3pieces contains a deux-pieces costume I have designed and sewn with my boyfriend out a German bier banner (fig. 2) and so on.

I hope in time icomeinpieces will become a consistent, online archive of personal interactions with urban spaces and urban furniture 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 the potential for continuous development for any of these actions. At the same time, I am also interested in the possibility of including fragments of written or recorded thoughts in relation to visual works as a way of approaching this topic from a different perspective. Maybe it could lead to something new or to aspects that I have never considered beforehand. This new perspective also comes in relation to a book I have found at the Photo Museum by Hans van der Meer, who took serial photographs of urban furniture in the center of various cities in the Netherlands. At the end of the book he included small, sketch-like texts about certain details found in certain photographs. Similar to his approach, I think the textual fragments could be integrated either in connection with certain materials or simply as a subjective reflection upon the role, the functions, the mechanisms or the dynamics of public space.

In what the performance part is concerned, even if I enjoy working with this medium, I have much more difficulty in approaching a subject and turning it into an event. This is probably because I have a tendency of rejecting any kind of “eventification” and also because I find it hard to narrow down the information from all possible content and layers of meaning that co-exist. I am also interested in blurring the line between performer and audience and focusing more on intersubjectivity and mediations of affect and power dynamics, as I dislike the hierarchy and power position that normally happen during a performance. These might also be the reasons why the few performances I did have slowly developed into a rather experiential approach, in which the focus becomes the relationship dynamics between the participant(s) and myself. I prefer to call them privatized shared experiences instead of performances, mainly because they involve a mundane component that can happen with anybody at any time, outside the art frame.

One of these experiences is The Lunch Series, an ongoing 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 can 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 participants have been people from my artistic milieu 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 where there is no particular focus on form, no pressure of accomplishing an expected outcome.

This project is very strongly connected to another one that I have been developed before coming to the Piet, called AA+ : Aerobics meets artist, which involved individual, personalized, approx. one hour long aerobic sessions for artists, developed according to each person’s personality. The sessions were normally 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 as artists. The sessions had a loose script and were mostly based on Augusto Boal’s techniques for improvisation, reciprocity, collaboration and negotiation. However, the development of each session was directly influenced by the artist’s approach and his/her level of involvement. These encounters represented a leave from the comfort zone and a physical interaction between artists, outside the virtual world or the gallery space. I hope they also enforced a positive attitude and more confidence in oneself through direct physical exercise.

Another aspect that has changed since I joined the course is that I have started to look at all my works, including performance, as being in a continuous state of development and potentiality that can be activated at any point in time. After an almost half year pause 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 organization problems, I ended up performing the exercises in the tram with two other people, which already meant for me a slow transition from the individual body to a collective one.

At the moment I am exploring the notion of engaging with a collective body, looking at ways in which it could be possible to expand my interests about generating everyday experiences inside the art frame towards a larger, mixed participation. I am also trying to embrace the ritual of the exhibition and the conventions in which the art object is placed instead of constantly trying to escape it, as a way of understanding the possibilities that this format can bring in terms of immaterial production of work, economies of performance, live sculpture etc. Also, because of the Performativity seminar and the readings I have done related to performance art in the Eastern European area, I became also very interested in the idea of archiving performance. Choosing this as Vivian’s topic for her seminar, I am interested in looking in comparison at the economies of performance and the different methods of preserving and curating it, as a way of maybe developing a personal manner of engaging with past performances or just for gaining a better understanding of how different dynamics, such as authenticity, liveness, documentation and participation come into play.

Though I do not have a very clear idea about what I want to do next year, I am interested in analyzing deeper the experience economy and how it affects or correlates with the position of the artist as tourist. How to situate my banal experiences within a contemporary approach that seeks to create unforgettable memories within an experience society?

References (to be rewrote in the Harvard system + add more that are missing)

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells IDEA. Arts+Society magazine Dorothea con Hantelmann The experiential turn Gerhard Schulze The Experience Society Performing the sentence Dean Maccannell The Tourist White Chapel Series Participation RoseLee Goldberg Performance Art Johan Lagae Reading Public Space in the (Non-Western) City