Clara Text
Hello!
if you klick on this link and then on the PDF doc you can read my essay.
Best
Clara
Here is an editable version of my text:
The most of my BA works was made as a reaction to the academy I was at, which had a focus on craft, textiles and control of 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 that I did not have that frustration as a driving force anymore.
I got intellectually, philosophically and theoretically challenged by the seminars, studio visits and my peers.
The paradox though, was that this put me in a position where I felt distanced from my creativity, confused about how to create. Along with this, my stress problems played in, for which I had sought methods to manage half a year before coming to Holland. This also changed my may of going around practice 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 working journal, to see a context between my research interests, I started a collaboration with Raluca and Madison focusing on using performance and intervention as a research method. This involves physically trying out ideas, improvising performances, thinking with our bodies. I also discovered that from my BA time I was trained in producing and executing ideas in a high tempo. Then projects we had then were normally four weeks and after every four week you started on a brand new totally different project. Realizing this about my practice I wanted to see what would change in my work if I let ideas and work take time and let works blend in to each other. 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.
My interest towards movements, choreography and non-verbal communication sprang out from me breaking with the craft-based ideology at my BA program. I started to work with performance and interventions in public space, which developed in to an interested in what the human body in that act transmits and how it creates a discourse. Also with documenting those experiments, I came in contact with moving images, which appealed to me because it provided me with more options and freed me in my way of thinking about what a material could exist of compered to 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.
In the project 8e that consist of 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 I wanted to work with the idea of movements mediated by muscle memory. I got questioned about this idea lot in studio visits, that I had not considered much that the idea dealt with a complex composition of history, feelings, memories, possible traumas, gossip etc. And also by reading Stella Bruzzi’s Perofrmative Documentary (Bruzzi 2006) in the performativity seminar, where she 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, became the start of a process of highly questioned my way of working with my concepts, my way of producing ideas fast and my focusing on body movements. By trying the project out in my first group critique in January I tried to work with those questions in the way I installed the work. To have one documenting part only focusing on the movements and one documentary part where I let performativity in. This helped me to understand more clearly how the parts operated, how they are particular from each other and what the act of performativity about the things I been questioned about in the studio visits contributed with to the understanding of the work.
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 of the performers. It aroused my interest in what exists between thoughts, speech and movements. And by re-shooting it because of poor image quality form the interim show, the work changes in to become Speculative Occupation and I felt that I had a stronger confident in the act between the performance and performativity and did not need to lean back on a narrative.
My more recent ides are still connected towards choreography and the physicality of the human body, but I want to direct it towards a prospective of knowledge, philosophy, politic, social acts and investigate how this shaped choreography and creates subjectivities. My thought are driven towards violence and non-violence, its theory, history and how it transformation into action. I want to look further in to the peace movement during the Vietnam War and their active choice of being physically passive and research the effects of the movement in the society. My thinking goes further on to re-enact a Jerry Springer TV talk shows (Jerryspringertv.com, 2015) from the USA, where their concept to entertain is enacted through violence and how it become mediated in a contemporary culture. But I am also thinking about warming up routines that athletes have and how that creates subjectivity, belonging and structure both individually and in groups and something that is closer to an for me experienced everyday.
Further I want strive after to let my work take a clearer form of a conversation, a discourse and state of unfinished and in this way try to blur its narrative borders. I want to treat my work as an essay to direct it towards a less didactic address but still be able to make without getting caught in fright of making statements. I also feel a need to be more experimental of expressing my work, in this moment I feel a bit stuck in working with moving images and I am curious what will happen if it let it take on another form like performance, performativity or interaction. I also see it relevant so consider my work’s temporality and it’s possibility of vanishing. 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.
Inspiring to this way of going around my work has among a few things has 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. We visited their last presentation of a tow year research program in Amsterdam with the performativity seminar. Their research was presented through film, performance, lectures and interviews. I could sense width within their conversation and also an element of ongoing that was highly present during the presentations.
Irena Botea’s (Botea 2015) masters class at the IFFR and her talk about how she look up on her self as both an artist and an educator has inspired my thinking. How she encounter her more political works but in the same time emphasizes the importance of create for fun and her approach of meeting people in her work to exchange knowledge with them.
The books that I am reading right now are Hanna Arendt’s On violence (Arendt 1970) and Andrew Hewitt’s Social Choreography (Hewitt 2005). On violence brings we towards an understanding of the connection between body politics and violence and how it has been used to shape societies though history. Social Choreoraphy in turn gives we the history of choreography, how its been controlled by a bourgeois class and in that way also shaped societies and social norms. Hewitt also brings up that it might not be a possible language to talk or write about choreography and how that idea can change the approach towards a physical expression and also towards violence. I am trying to co-read the two books, to see how that effects my research and my understanding of them.
Fore some time I 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 and thinking. It been a lot. It has been easy to give myself bad concussions for not working enough, but I have been trying to keep on encouraging myself that the long way sometimes a good choice for me. That I will achieve a better understanding towards my work, a better awareness and a confidence in my making and thinking. And it is first recently that I have started to feel more comfortable in taking the long way, to brake with the hasty idea production and let my self get lost within all the new knowledge and experiences. And then, from that lost point try to find the way again. I have started to see the positive effects off this in my practice in terms of that a I have initiated a reconnection with my creativity, that I feel comfortable in blending my ideas, that it brings back my lust for experimenting, playing and to find new challenges. I can see that my time at the Piet Zwart has provided me with tools and confidence to develop my way of doing research, connecting my work to theory and to have more stable base to operate from in my practice. And what is liberating to me in all this is that it is done without me being fucking angry all the time or that I stress myself out so much that my body stops functioning as it should. It all encourage me to keep on developing, taking risks and pushing my practice further. It feels like cravings.