Since Gavin Butt gave his talk Should we take Performances Seriously? at the PSI 14 conference in Copenhagen and since I saw the nutrition guru Anne Knudsen Larsen on the front cover of the Danish weekly Søndagsavisen I have been thinking; which one of these moments of “kissing fish performance” is most odd?
So, we are watching this Antonioni movie, I tre volti. She looks like my mother, as young. We’re in an auditorium. There’s a cat on the floor.
It’s her lips, the lower one is ”dripping.” She’s calling her mother, she asks her to come. She’s alone, perdida en el mundo, sentimentalismo puro (a mí, no funcione). She asks her to come. In German. She’s a young German girl in Italy trying her way as an extra, as an actress.
The quality is bad, there are no subtitles. But how she looks like my mother.
”Why are you suspicious, I have the impression that you are very cold? Why do you want to be an actress?”
After the film he talks about participation, about a moment of fascination between a public and 3 melodrama actors. They believe, the public. Like my sister. We once went to a theatre to see Medea. When Medea killed her to kids, raised the theatre knife and stabbed them, my sister screamed. She believed. Her husband, a film director, always says she’s the best public ever, because she really believes. Yesterday she had her second kid and she never watches the tele at night in order to sleep undisturbed by the reality the tele brings her.
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Neorealismus – that the actors participate. The moment where the actors believe, act what they are acting – or the other way around.
The gesture of pointing to the screen and saying to his wife; ”look, look, look what’s gonna happen!” Cada vez – otra vez, it happens again for the first time.
We don’t just perceive fictional worlds from without, we live with them, sharing their sorrows and joys. We are perfectly aware they’re fictional, but from within they look real.
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Now the cat is cuddling his leg.
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El participación en la obra del arte es constitutiva. The artwork exists in this tension, in this difficulty of being within these two, inside and outside, real and fictional, of being constitutive.
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Ambigüedad con el arte
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(Inspired by the lecture “Quasi. Antonioni y la participación en el arte” by Alex Düttmann at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago)
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day
12.35: Hans Ulrich Gumbricht quoting (whom I heard to be) Pablo Morales. Universidad Diego Portales, Facultad de Comunicación y Letras.
Filed under: Santiago stories, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language
There he was, again: ”You can do better than that. Bring interesting thoughts to the fore. Don’t think you have to please people.” This time we were sitting on a terrase viewing Valparaiso at night. I had invited both of them for a Pisco Sour. I looked at the lights, the sea and the dark reflections moving in the cold summer wind. Soon it would be autumn, in April. This was just another thing I had to get used to; inversion of rythms that meant clashes and conflicts between my body, it’s stubborn habbit of orchestrating itself by seasons, daylight, weather. Now I could only submit and it, my body, didn’t like it.
I registered his presence next to me, how he was attentive for an answer, or more, a response. ”But I cannot do that, you cannot expect me to be clever on behalf of being displaced, uprooted.” … ”I’m exhausted, I’m trying, but I really don’t know what to do. I can only register, I can only take in; I can smell, look and listen as far as my body lets me do it.” … “And just to let you know, to register is a phenomenological methodology; always first register. And this, I want to follow.” (1)
Now our voices were loud, in front of us was a smiling face, a smiling, but investigating face. What are they doing, why are they word fighting? Why this clash?
Today, I learned that ”soy” does not only mean I am in Spanish, but also spoken word and woven material in Dogon language. (2)
Yesterday, a woman told me she by chance had read my story on returning to Denmark. She really liked it. It made her hair rise. ”It’s Sisi who’s writing this!” She didn’t know I liked to write. Or, like to write.
That’s another thing. I’m learning a language. A new language. One day I wrote in my diary: ”Today I said the rr-sound correctly for the first time.” I felt like a baby registering its own first word. It’s on this stage I find myself, like a fragile being without words in a new world. How does he want me to reflect, to bring interesting thoughts to the fore?
What felt in the fore, in front of me, was a wall. I met it everytime I went out. ”So, what are you doing here?” ”Do you know Spanish? Oh, you’re learning. You really have to improve your Spanish to get somewhere.” (I know that, I’m not stupid, why do you think I’m spending my savings on private lessons?) ”What would you like to do here?” ”Oh, you came here because of love? I suppose that’s good, I mean, or what….” ”Do you have any plans for your future?” (What do you think yourself, I do, of course, but how can I make plans in a situation I cannot control, a situation I don’t know?)
One night I told someone that my future doings would not only depend on me, but also on the place, Santiago, my new city. She got aggressive, it did not depend on the place, but on the attitude. One can make it everywhere, it only depends on one’s attitude. I retrieved from that discussion. Didn’t care and didn’t dare. Too much, just let me be, don’t look at me, don’t reflect me, I don’t want to face myself.
Today, an other woman told me: ”There’s a difference between seeing oneself as a link in the net and being subjected to comparisons of oneself to others.” (3) It helps me to retrospectively answer back that other woman, the aggressive one. I don’t want to compare myself, “to make it.” But maybe this is what people see in me, a Western woman coming here to make it?
Traditionally, I cannot be an other woman as I’m from the West, from Europe. I have red hair and milk white skin with a bit of freckles. I cannot be Other. My body tells the world so. And yet, I feel so other, so otherly other. It’s nice. And it’s completely horrible – like when the nasty speaker in the conference wants secretely to know about that wonderful woman in the back. Viejo verde (4) was a clever response of an other older woman. She’s been in the business for some years. She has found her way.
This is what I’m trying to do; find my way. I get small confirmations on the way. Like reading this sentence: ”To be an other among others can be a profoundly transformative experience.” (5) This is what i want. I want to be transformed, I want to experience, to live and to love. And this is what I am doing, what makes me so utterly happy. But also what rubs off so otherly many sparks, so much heat that it’s not only nice and warm, but hot like hell.
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It was today he played the song that said I love you badly. We were sitting in the same room in front of each a table. Writing and reading. Concentrated. The refrain made us look at one another. This is why we’re here, we’re here because we love, badly, too much. We sleep close, we eat close, we bike close, even our desks, our books, our clothes want to be close.
And here we are, now, again, he’s looking at me, with a smile. An investigating smile. Why is she so concentrated, what is it that she’s writing? He hasn’t known me always, he’s still learning. But he knows. He approaches me and kisses me. Just in time, at times, I guess. (6) Outside, Santiago is turning dark, the cars are flickering together with light from commercials. Champagne and socks. The Madonna is still there, on the hill, holding her hands over the city together with the 80’s cell phone shaped building. We have to finish, we have to go out there, to become embraced by noise, smell, pollution and the many encounters, between people, in nets, among others, among each others. Once again, I ask the tissue of neighbourhood to grasp me when I’m falling. I think it likes me, I think it’ll grap me, rescue me and give me a hand everytime something pushes me over the limit. Up, again, we’re here, we’ll hold you, as you’ll hold us.
1: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 1992, p. viii: ‘It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analysing.’
2: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana university Press, 1989, p. 128.
3: Minh-ha, Trinh T. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Films Featured at Documenta. An interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha and Genevieve Shiffrar. June 26, 2002. Page last visited May 10, 2009.
4: Viejo verde means an old man who likes young women in Chilean slang.
5: Minh-ha, 2002.
6: Bowie, David. “Cygnet Commitee” in Space Odity, 1972.
Check the new SUM #3 magazine for contemporary art – an international magazine in danish and english published by U-turn Quadrennial for Contemporary Art and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
this time the theme is on re-enactment and i’m participating with an article on Black Audio Film Collective/biography/re-enactment.
the magazine is available in selected bookshops and museums.
enjoy!
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, Kunst / Art, The Love Libration Movement, bla bla on writing and language, never written books - or telling titles
Hvad jeg gerne ville skrive om på bloggen lige nu:
En intro om at læse en intro, der udreder et kludret og endeløst forgrenet stamtræ, som vokser og vokser og bare bliver ved og ved og er kortlagt bagest i bogen, så man bladrer frem og tilbage og repeterer på vejen, men forstår kun lidt – min intro ditto.
Om det hemmeliges potentiale som værende det ultimative skabelses-frirum i en kunstnerisk kontekst
Om Walid Raad, “performance as faith” og Raads fascination af enkeltpersoner i historien.
Om at vågne op og ikke vide hvem man er eller hvor man er, men være sikker på, at det er juleaften.
Filed under: Dagens ord / Word(s) of the day, In the mood for, The Love Libration Movement
“If you play me, I’ll play you” is a sentence I still haven’t understood. It appeared in a talk by artist Hassan Khan at Homeworks IV in Beirut last April. It was just a sentence in a sampled pop song or something like that – but it has kept lingering in my head. Like a play back system. Now, reading an interview on love with the psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller I’m wondering whether the sentence might be a synonym for a psychoanalytical understanding of a love relation between two people. Jacques Alain Miller says that one loves the person that can answer the question: “Who am I?” and it means that one has to acknowledge one has a lack that the other person can fill. As such, one is also dependent on the other person, which is why some people become aggressive from love – it’s difficult to admit one’s dependency and thereby one’s independency.
If you make me play, press the magical play button that make my self sing on all of its strings, then, I’ll play you(rs).
Ocean's Thirteen and a love dilettante in a screen. Flying to Beirut the 24th of October 2007
Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a blog. Or maybe I should say; Today, I was chatting with my friend M, who also has a block. A writers blog/ck. A couple of hours later I received this email:
Sisi
chatting with you today, I had the idea of writing in the blog about resistances and voices, intuition, breath. Is there a nice passage on the voice that I can have a look at? There is the Michel Serres book here, Genesis, going to have a look.
bawse from the office
Miro
I answered:
yes, i have something for you, i’ll scan it, kisses, s
I went upstairs to the scanners at my university and there I found two pictures with their white back facing me. I decided to scan them without knowing what they depicted – it may be a sign!
It was not, or maybe it was. A sign of campus life and a happy youth; snapshots (or not, it was paper photographies) to be send to friends or family abroad.
cut
The passage I wanted to scan for M is from The Black Beach by Edouard Glissant. I hadn’t been thinking of this text for two years until i read the words resistances and voices, intuition, breath in M’s email. I hope the silent ghost on Glissant’s beach will provoke some thoughts. They both gave me a reason to post a block.
(I imagine two young women (one at the corniche in Beirut and one on the beach in CPH) walking in resistance and silence, listening to the breath and voices of the sea)
