Clara Thesis Outline & Proposal"
Bodies of Water
Using ceramic instruments, how can I create a performance expressing a sense of awe and gratitude towards more-than-human entities?
“Bodies of Water” is a ritualistic performance film which draws attention to the extraction of clay and the regeneration of the landscape by natural forces.
(2-5) Performers congregate around, and interact with, an altar from ceramic instruments in an extraction lake; a lake which is a remnant of an exploited clay pit.
It aims to express and evoce a calm sense of awe and gratitude towards more-than-human entities that enable the landscape to recover after it has been violated by humans.
Body of water
fill the abyss
Fill the void
of what’s left behind.
Motherloads exhausted
but mothers returning.
The following collection of short stories reacts to the making of the film as they document memories and ideas in relation to the themes clay, water, music and the act of congregating; Seeking for moments in which mind and body are able to rest in the present moment, fighting the identification with destructive, instead experiencing awe and gratitude.
THESIS DRAFT
Bodies of Water
Our bodies of water
jump into
a body of water
turns into
bodies of water
jump into
a body of water.
Red Brick House
She grew up in a suburbia shaped from red brick houses hosting 2 perfectly normed, nuclear family constellations at a time. She moved into a red brick house hosting 250 humans challenging these norms. She moved into a red brick house with two other artists, tedious mice, pigeons that would release themselves in her room when the door would be left open and moths nibbling on her French berets.
She despises the color red more than anyone she ever met.
Lehels House
A picturesque drive on a warm, late June day amongst the softly green, hilly landscape of the Hungarian countryside. On the back seat Azul, one of the three dogs in the silver Toyota is napping, his head rested on one of the three humans labs. He is napping too. Amber is driving. I am on the passenger seat. The atmosphere of this place, combined with our sisterly dynamic and flowy skirts remind me of Grimms fairytale Snow-White and Rose-Red. The story of two sisters living with their mother, spending their days pruning red and white roses.
A turn onto a sandy driveway brings us to a beautiful, white, cob house. The grass is high and the building overgrown by vine branches. The garden is a jungle from almond trees, nettles and tomato plants. Lehel, the old man who build the house himself with only 2 helpers, had been off the radar for a while now. People at the local market have been asking Amber about him, as he has not been selling his glasses of wheatgrass pulp, Manarax he calls it, over there for weeks by now. She doesn't know where he has been.
What she does know, is the code to his number lock and they let themselves in. At first sight the house seamed a little small, but when entering one is greeted with an open loft, all white and soft edged walls. Around 9pm they dip their naked bodies into the endless, turquoise lake Balaton, just a few minutes drive away. The rest of the night they spend inside the house from clay and straw, high, dancing on the various levels and on top of the huge clay oven in the center of it, singing, playing the guitar, wondering where the creator of this place could possibly be.
The next day they pack up and sneakily leave the house behind, lock locked again as if they had never been here.
Geophagia
At 10:36 on a Tuesday morning I get a text from Felix.
“Hi girl
Wanna be crazy and go to Kyrgyzstan with me?
Found flights for 70€”
"When?" "How?"
“In March.
Look up it’s far as fuck”
At 1:25pm the flights are booked. I guess this is happening.
We start researching what we actually just signed up for. The “Switzerland of Asia” seems to be a beautifully mountainous country, far from what we know, far in general. 5000km far with a time difference of 5 hours. Definitely the most random decision we have made in a while. I don’t think I have ever even talked to anyone from Kyrgyzstan.
One day later I get another text from Felix.
“Yooo
Dune wants to come!
Omg they booked”
Another day later:
“Lisa is coming!
Just booked the flights for her haha”
Another day passes and I find a new group chat in my chat history.
One more person, Paula, signed up for the unusual endeavor. I have never met her before. Curious. Very curious. About all of it.
I start looking for clay mines and extraction lakes, maybe I justify this trip to myself by using it for my master research?
I don’t want to know how many hours I have recently spent on Google Maps, searching for the white spots signaling a possible clay mine or the turquoise excavation lakes. I would confidently call it my new hobby at this point to be honest, and I don’t mind. Ever zoomed into the pacific between Alaska and Russia? Theres this small eerie island called Diomede. Look it up. Right now. Don’t even want to try to explain it to you. I also realized the overwhelming size of Greenland, especially in contrast to it’s 56.583 inhabitants. How do they come up with such concrete population numbers? Who are THEY?
I think of the flat in Berlin, Friedrichshain that I lived in back in 2021. Me and 2 friends, none of us ever registered, none of us allowed to put our name on the door, parcels permanently not being delivered right. Well these numbers are also just humanity trying to make sense of things I guess.
I think of one of my favorite quotes from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
“Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: “What does his voice sound like?””
Well. No matter what I can’t find any clay mines, not even when searching in Russian or Kyrgyz. “Чопо карьери”. Nothing. “Глиняный карьер”. Nada.
Okok but now let me tell you what I DID find. Ever heard of geophagia? No? Me neither. It's a term describing the practice of eating soil, such as clay. Yeah, it’s a thing.
Okok. So it turns out to be a common practice that people in Kyrgyzstan eat clay. Yepp. Eat it. Chunks of it. Just like that. I find images of market stands in Bishkek with varieties of gray, yellow and blueish clay bits, ready to be munched. I find a website called museumofedible.earth where the blue clay is described as following:
“One of the most delicious clays. It has a beautiful light gray color with yellow streaks on the surface of the piece. The clay is dense and homogeneous in structure. It bites off with a crunch, breaks down into plates and melts into a delicate creamy mass, practically without sticking. At the very beginning, there is a subtle sweetish aftertaste. This clay has a very rich clay taste. Nourishing.”
“They eat clay.”
Felix repeats several times over bottles of wine at his place a few days later.
“They EAT clay!”
Two Solar Punks
We are standing close to the check-in of the boulder gym with its view onto a depressing looking canal, on yet another gray, rainy day in this puddle of a town. My friend looks down on his phone, yet internally prepared to scramble up and down walls for hours.
We grew up together in suburban Hamburg and decided to study in this small student town in the Netherlands, 3 1/2 hours West from home.
We are waiting for someone he has recently met. They will join us today. A blond man, boy, well in his early twenties, enters. He is wearing a snug fitting brown leather jacket with a fur collar. There is something arrogant about him. He smiles and my judgment immediately evaporates. I nervously drop my cards on the floor next to the counter. He helps me pick them up and we introduce ourselves.
He’s a good hugger.
Odd to think of another heartbreak and year of friendship later, these two will spend 3 years of their lives being with each other.
Odd to think about, now that we are not anymore.
We were quite the cliche hippie-esque couple. Long haired blondies. Idealists. Intensive travelers. Our relationship opening and closing. Vegetarian. Opening and closing our relationship, vegetarian, and not to forget to finish off hippie cliches; white and from privileged households. Our lives together were contradictory in itself, preaching about sustainability, while flying to Cape Town to visit friends and the Burning Man Festival in the middle of the South African desert.
The solutions to almost all global issues seemed obvious to both of us; universal basic income, community housing, local produce…
He would be the one to switch between utopian excitement, in which a group of friends would buy a little piece of land and live in a community in the Italian mountains, build a cob house, grow microgreens and mushrooms, and a dystopian luring (climate) anxiety, confronted with the inescapable and destructive, patriarchal and capitalist structures which we grew up with.
I wonder if he will ever have that little farm, as over the years we both started to sense the exact craving for a stable life and income, which would be judged loudly over glasses of wine and beer throughout the years. What an odd, roller coaster of a decade the twenties are.
Stubborn as I am, I would not want to agree with his often exaggerated statements and facts to underline his argumentation on how this messed up world could be changed after all. But behind that reflex of stubborn disagreement, I did at core agree to his points.
We both aligned in the way we would like to imagine a future in which nature, humans and technology could coexist and interact.
We were and will be solarpunks at heart.
A confusing swimming lesson, with winds between 0 and 100mph and occasional water up the nose
I bathe in the resonating sound of his deep voice, unable to think clearly or respond.
I bathe in melodies, intoxicated and surrounded by alienated, yet oddly connected bodies.
I bathe my naked body in an icy stream, who directly made its way from the mountains, stopping my breath for a second.
I bathe in the giggles shared with friends, allowing each other to make increasingly inappropriate jokes throughout the evening.
I bathe in your hug, wanting to request another one as soon as we let go of the embrace.
Go with the waves of your emotions, my therapist said.
Isn't life sometimes like a first surf lesson, in which salt water keeps going up your nose, in this weirdly gross and painful, yet oddly satisfying way?
Clay head
Immersing my hands in the soft body of soil, I forget about the concept of time until my back painfully reminds me of the duration of my doing.
I intuitively stroke the material until the desired smoothness of the surface is achieved. An extension of my own body and mind, each object recognisable as my hands’ collaboration with the organic matter.
I started working with clay during the last year of my undergraduate degree at an art academy in the north of the Netherlands. Making and failing plenty, my usually impatient self would be pinned to the ceramics studio for many hours at a time.
The small room almost hidden behind the cantine hadn't really caught my attention in the 3 years leading up to this point, possibly due to the dislike of the oddly unmotivated workshop instructor.
I went on to take a turntable course in Barcelona, impatiently waiting until I could go back to my class in Gràcia, a lively neighborhood towards the mountains. The class was led by the calm handed, attractive, tattooed teacher Antonio. It started by watching him in the almost sensual act of centering a 500 gram piece of clay, a slurping soundscape while continuously changing the shape from a phallic tower to a flat blob.
“Un poco más!” Would be one of his typical comments in the next step of the process; trimming. Tapping on the shape I was working on, he was listening to the sound of the hollow body. Once the sound became drum-like, hollow, it was time to stop cutting down and leave the little creation to dry and wait for its next step.
Baking, glazing, baking, and after 4 weeks in total I would finally hold my first own cups. Oh, the pride. Every piece but one would be gifted to family members for Christmas a month later, every excited reaction feeding my confidence and wanting to continue making aimlessly.
The one I didnt give away from that first initial batch, my favorite, was a cup accidentally sliding down the wheel, twirled around and dented. A beautifully accidental, asymmetrical mistake.
Glaze stuck to the kiln, 20 mouldy, non-waterproof cups, completely melted pieces and many more mistakes would follow.
I arrogantly seem to hardly want to use a mass produced vessel of any kind anymore, knowing the bliss I feel when holding one made with my, my friends or my sisters hands.
It lures me in, the workshop. I wonder if I am just productively procrastinating.
Mermaids
They hadn't been together for a few months now, but couldn't fully let go of what they lost yet, with a slight hope and confusion that it might not actually be over yet.
So they plan a night on the beach on a late summer evening, stopping at a gas station to buy wood for a fire.
He has the tendency to misjudge directions and distances and trying to not fall back into her unfair patterns of bickering she retains her joking tone while they accidentally walk in circles with their heavy bags through a small forest to the dunes.
It took longer than he would have thought to start the fire too, but eventually the ripped out pages of her notebook ignite the thick pieces of wood.
The fire still burning they run into the cold sea, luminescent algae glowing up shyly around them. “It was so much stronger two days ago”, he says.
She takes another slow dive through the little sparks of light and starts whirling her hand around the water, almost as if trying to whip it like egg white for a meringue.
They spend the rest of the evening side by side by the fire, eating risotto he cooked the day before and exchanging music they have been listening to since they broke up.
It starts to rain, so they decide to go home instead of sleeping in the dunes, as they had planned at first.
When they come home she grabs the guitar, and starts singing along to her fingers moving the strings. “I love when you sing”, he says, rolled up on the couch next to her.
Bibliography
Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2015.
In the intersection between science and indigenous knowledge, Kimmerer shares personal experiences and revelations, teaching a new appreciation towards nature's gifts. Especially her ideas of “honorable harvesting methods” were very intriguing to me.
Coelho, Paulo. Hippie. Hamish Hamilton, 2018.
Generally one of my favorite authors, Coelho’s book Hippies is his most autobiographical one so far. It tells about him and his lover Karla’s journey to Nepal in a bus from Dam Square, Amsterdam. A book that speaks of journeys, young love and the values and lifestyle related to the term hippie.
I also see the writing style of this book as something I can draw inspiration from for my thesis.
Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Namaste Publishing, 1997.
Stepping away from a mind centered definition of self, Tolle’ teaching of mindfulness focus on, well, being present in the now, while consciously choosing when to think in future and past terms. He addresses the mind and it’s “tricks”, with which it distracts us from being present.
Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha S. Fischer Verlag, 1922.
Hesse describes the spiritual journey of the young Siddhartha. Initially seeing strength in the ability to fast and live an ascetic life, the young man embarks on a journey that confronts him with many challenges, makes him dive into the world of materialism, which he sees as a game and turns away from.
Finally he finds wisdom and calm in a river. Here he becomes a ferryman, known for his enlightened being.
Ende, Michael. Momo. Thienemann Verlag, 1973.
A book that my father read to me when I was a child and that my dance school reenacted on stage. Only now I fully understand the value of it. Momo is an orphan child living in an abandoned theater. Her character strikes with strong listening skills and her humble nature.
“Gray men” enter the small town that she lives in and start stealing people's time, it becomes a new currency that has to be saved and put in a savings account.
Visualizing a human's time in so-called hour-lilies, the book gives a poetically rich analysis of how humans do not value time, which is not spent “productively”.
Artistic References
Ragnar Kjartansson - Death is Elsewhere
A film installation in which two sets of twins move around screens set up in a circle, singing a song called Death is Elsewhere for 77 minutes at summer solstice.
"I keep thinking of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and these magical nights of love. We're having a lovely time in nature; the horror of the world seems elsewhere. But midsummer is also a reminder of death, or darkness. That's the psyche of the Arctic regions. It's getting brighter and brighter, but the light is already starting to fade into blessed darkness."-Ragnar Kjartansson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdqSGBjTRk
Mel Arsenault - Altars
The Canadian artist Mel Arsenault is also playing on the intersection of science and spirituality, often creating altars and embracing her collaboration with the elements, the pigments in her work, interacting with the fire to become something out of her control.
https://melarsenault.com/Le-Jardin-des-AstrocytesII
Vica Pacheco
Ceramic instruments and installations