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:
Most of my BA works were made as a reaction to the academy I was at, which focused on craft, textiles and the control of material. My frustration mostly sprang from a lack of conceptual emphasis and an unwillingness to even go near that subject. On arriving at Piet Zwart I realized that I did not have that frustration as a driving force anymore. I was 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 and confused about how to create. Along with this, my problem with stress played a part, for which I had sought methods to manage half a year before coming to Holland. This also changed my approach to my 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 while doing so.
It has been an attempt to discover new tools and methods that could function as a motor in my process. I re-discovered reading, and began a working journal, to see a context between my research interests. I started a collaboration with fellow students 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 time on my BA I was trained to produce and execute ideas at a high tempo. The projects we had then were normally four weeks and after which time you started on a 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 allowed works to blend into 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 to make my concepts clearer.
My interest in movement, choreography and non-verbal communication sprang from my break with a craft-based ideology at my BA program. I started to work with performance and interventions in public space, which developed into an interest in what the human body in that act transmits and how it creates a discourse. Also with documenting those experiments, I came into contact [began to work] 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 consist 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 wanted 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.
The project 8e 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 a great deal in studio visits. I had not considered that this idea dealt with a complex composition of history, feelings, memories, possible traumas, gossip etc. I also read Stella Bruzzi’s Perofrmative Documentary (Bruzzi 2006) in the performativity seminar, where she writes about how re-enactment is practiced as a way to understand history, the difficulties of achieving authenticity and how it becomes a performed truth. These ideas helped me begin a process and highly question my way of working with my concepts, my way of producing ideas rapidly and my focus 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 introduced performativity. This helped me understand more clearly how the parts operated, how they are particular from each other and what the act of performativity about the things I had 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 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 to choreography and the physical communication of the human body, but for me, those words are loaded with context that I am not sure that I want my work to talking about, for ex. modern dance or performance art. I feel that I have a difficulty to express how I want to engage with those terms, but I think it is more about creating material through a physical act then preforming choreographed movements. This is blurry for me and I see an importance to clarify this more to establish an even better awareness towards where my work operates or not operates in a contemporary art context. What discourse do I like be a part of and which role I want theory to play in my practice?
With this I want to direct my research towards social acts, politic, knowledge and communication and investigate how those angels of approach influence or inhabit choreography. This also embraces a curiosity to experiment with the expression of my ideas and not to let me become too comfortable in working with moving images and performing for a camera. What happens if the choreography is a text? A sound? A happening? A workshop? An audio guide? A interaction? How can it be transformed? Can it be de humanized? How dose it respond to performativity? To temporality? To vanishing?
I want to make work that takes a clearer form of a conversation, a discourse in a provisional and unfinished state. One method that I want to use to try get close to that state is to treat my work as an essay, which is directed to a less didactic address, but will still allow me to make without getting caught in the fear of making statements. 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. Along the way I have been inspired by a few things, one of them has been 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). Their work appeal to me in that sense of their long-term research period and the way they presented the results of the research in form of a week long program of film, performance, lectures and interviews. I find that they managed to keep the conversation going even in the stat of tier presentation, something that I am looking for in my own work.
Another event that has been influencing my thinking was the master class with Irena Botea (Botea 2015) at the IFFR and her talk about how she sees herself as both an artist and an educator and how she accesses this knowledge exchange in the encounter and communication with people she meets or works with. For me she lets her work exist on a political level but where she also letting elements of humor take a major part in it, something that I see as balance and where I would like to put my work closer to.
At the moment my I am reading Hanna Arendt’s On violence (Arendt 1970) and Andrew Hewitt’s Social Choreography (Hewitt 2005) which are books that I like to commence my coming research from. On Violence brings we towards an understanding of the connection between body politics and violence and how it has been used to shape societies throughout history. Social Choreography in turn gives us the history of choreography, how its been controlled by a bourgeois class and in this way has also shaped societies and social norms. Hewitt also suggests that it might not be a possible for 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 read the two books simultaneously, to see how they can effect my understanding of body politic from two different source. 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, the history of ideas, talking, words and thinking. It's been a lot. It has been easy to give myself bad concussion for not working enough, but I have been trying to keep on encouraging myself that the long way is sometimes a good choice for me. That I will achieve a better understanding of my work, a better awareness and a confidence in making and thinking. And it is only recently that I have started to feel more comfortable in taking the long way, to brake with 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 of this in my practice as 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 a more stable base to operate from. 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. All this encourages me to keep on developing, taking risks and pushing my practice further. It feels like cravings.