ID VESTI
NULLAM
Quisque vitae rutrum mi. Aliquam ac erat at neque accumsan tristique. Praesent id tempor nisl.
Nunc erat velit, aliquet non consectetur non, placerat eget sapien. Donec pellentesque, enim ac gravida congue, lorem velit aliquet turpis, non adipiscing mauris dui at nisi. Nulla lobortis sagittis ligula, nec tristique nisl iaculis a. Proin cursus mi a nunc bibendum fermentum. Integer ultricies arcu et nunc interdum id sagittis mauris pharetra. Duis elementum aliquam eros, nec egestas orci laoreet eget. Nunc erat velit, aliquet non consectetur non, placerat eget sapien. Duis elementum aliquam eros, nec egestas orci laoreet eget. Nunc erat velit, aliquet non consectetur non, placerat eget sapien. Duis elementum aliquam eros, nec egestas orci laoreet eget. Nunc erat velit, aliquet non.Fusce sit amet sem nibh. Phasellus rhoncus imperdiet egestas.
Nunc erat velit, aliquet non consectetur non, placerat eget sapien. Duis elementum aliquam eros,
Maecenas elit nunc, porttitor non tincidunt nec, scelerisque vel dolor. Suspendisse consectetur ma-uris vitae odio semper euismod. Curabitur in enim augue. Curabitur vel tincidunt odio. Integer volu-tpat tempus nunc, sed molestie velit pellentesque eu lacinia purus.
“Praesent imperdiet nunc et sem dignissim elementum. Donec lobortis congue fringilla. Donec justo consequat ornare sodales.
Nunc posuere mattis mi, ut facilisis ligula accumsan vel. In consectetur accumsan diam, eget porttitor justo luctus id. “
14
Jimmy: …I don’t know if it’s about relief. For me it’s not relief, it’s just about creating a space where we face these things, come into contact, it’s about contact. We come into contact with the pain of being alive, the joy of being alive, these essential things, and it’s not about judging them to be good or bad or providing anything. If people feel relief in relation to our work, then that’s great, but if people get pain from it that is also great. I don’t see a huge distinction between those two because pain is also very very important and if you take away pain from the equation, then it kind of nullifies your existence on the most basic primary physical level. That’s what it’s about; it’s about contact with the emotional body. Taylor: I suppose for me I feel a need to create spaces where we re-establish meaning but without meaning anything, where everything looks meaningful but isn’t meaningful in a wider context. It has an intensity where it feels like our emotions are conjured in such a way that there is a sense that it’s all for something but not prescribing what that something is. Jimmy: Ideally we make shows about nothing. Existence happens no matter what, that’s what we’re directly trying to interact with at the most direct level, but you can’t take a direct route there because the language of theatre does not take direct routes. Theatre wanders through avenues of representation which are never direct, that’s one reason why we utilise such dense images; they have the effect of ‘opening up’, rather than ‘closing down’ or concluding. This is also why we have these very dense soundscapes: they are indirect routes to, strangely, nothing. Liam: I think that clarifies our interest in noise art. That as much as the language of theatre is always representational; is always in-direct, the noise art serves as a kind of antidote to that. Because the sounds we use often aren’t even identifiable in their source, but they create an emotion. A guitar or a violin or a harp or a drum each have a certain set of associations that you create with, whereas the noise is raw you can’t build those associations because there’s no origin point. Jimmy: Strangely enough it’s taking an indirect route to nothing in particular apart from contact with existence itself. But what sound does brilliantly, particularly in the way that we’re using it, is that it is extremely direct without being directly prescriptive. It is direct in a physical sense, it hits the body and it interacts with the body, yet it remains invisible. It’s sound closer to its primordial state; energy, sound as energy, and its very direct in that sense. At the same time, it’s not as confined as instrumentation or as music to an emotional paradigm, it has a much wider scope than that. It can yield emotions, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily have to, it can for example, simply collide with your body. Liam: It’s about moving people, not like a beautiful song would move you, like how a strong vibration will move you, like a strong bass you can feel rumbling up through the floor that you can feel in your stomach. That’s the level we start with in our compositions.
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your company’s artistic practice or has impacted the way your company thinks about your identity as a participant of the visual culture?
I have been developing my visual imagery since I began studying art and film - from conceptual thinking, composition, using light and colour in different ways, through all the different techniques I've utilised over the years in my work and in my collaborations with stage artists such as dancers, musicians and actors. My approach is always developing through exploring these things. Visual imagery in essence is your way of experiencing what you see and transforming it. This is my world that I want to share and express through my art. The body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity is part of this visual imagery, the emotional essence in my practice. Always present and always developing in different themes and projects.
Marina Abramovic stated: You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of
which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'Can you relate anyhow to these words?
Liam: One that’s had an impact on the way that I think about our work is Tadeusz Kantor’s use of figures instead of characters. As a primarily visual artist he thought of actors more like paint moving through the canvas and I think that’s been relatively informative to the way in which we’ve approached our ‘figures’. Their psychology is kind of unimportant compared to their aesthetics, their movement, their sound. Taylor: For me it’s always been Ron Athey, especially his Messianic Rituals. His aesthetics are beautiful, we obviously don’t work with body art practises or bloodletting or anything like that, and I’m not interested in that, but the composition has such a scream behind it, using all of his energy to direct his choices, in terms of composition, to articulate that scream in all its painful glory. That has been inspiring when thinking about our work. Jimmy: Visual things don’t tend to inspire me visually. Sonic things don’t tend to influence the sonic elements of the work. But for inspiration I would say William Basinski’s disintegration loops. Not because of how they sound (although woundingly beautiful), but underneath that, there’s a very specific sense of time you get from them, from Basinki’s loops in general. He says they’re like ‘bubbles of eternity’ and when you listen to the loop you can’t really tell if it has a beginning or an end, you can’t really place that. When you’re hearing it, it starts to open eternity out in front of you, for an instance you perceive time as an infinitely dense phenomenon, you also feel all of life crumbling, disintegrating in the face of time, it wounds you, but it is beautiful, necessary. That’s what I get from it. I get feelings from things and that’s my influence, rather than “I like that aesthetic I want to do something like that”. And if things do inspire me in that way, I immediately try to cull it, because I know it’s not coming from me, and is downright lazy.
Unfortunately the human being does'nt choose the place where he is born. He grows up in a society that automatically identifies, through education, culture, family... More than ever I think it's more important to go on a way of self-knowledge with the aim to meet “the other”.. This other without which we can not exist. It's the same for the artist. It is more important for me to be focused on my practice than to try to define it according to esthetic criteria of identification. It's probably the reason i like to remember the painter Matisse who said or wrote that an artist must never be prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation.
Would you like to tell us something about your background? Could you talk a little about experiences that has influence the way you currently relate yourself to your artworks?
All my way is influenced by encounterings.
It began by the meeting with my professor of literature at school. More than giving French or Literature classes, she brought us to discover texts, movies, plays, visual artworks and to think about on what we saw or read.. Thanks to her that I met Pierre Vincke, a theatredirector who was worjink in the tradition of Grotowski ... Both of them have led me to go to theater school. In this school I had meetings. Meetings with artists but also and especially human beings that made me discover. I always need o discover rather than to master a practice. It's probably the reason my encounter with Monica Klingler and Boris Nieslony was decisive for me and led me on the path of Performance Art which is a form still difficult to define. Each performance artist has a different definition of what it is...
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?
No I don't have a specific artwork that has influenced my artistic practise but many.
I'm influenced by some philsophers as well as poets or musicians or dancers or visual artists but also by some places or landscapes or atmospheres ... For some years, I was used for example to go to India where I was used to follow some traditionnal muscians or to learn bharatanatyam and practice vipassana meditation... Of course this experience has impacted my art work.... This brought me to think and work differently... My experience in India brought me to discover traditionnal strong art and paradoxally to the way of Performance Art. But there I see one common point: to make no separation between art and life and to be here and now, without projection on the future.
It's difficult for me to speak about race and ethnic identity. But I can say that today we miss more and more this notion of “to be here and now” which is more present in some cultures ... By practising Performance Art, it's my way to be connected to this way of thinking. And even in this field actually it's more and more difficult. The society and the art world brings us more and more to plan in advance, to define our work, more than to do. Just to do. To do what we deeply need.
And of course, my encountering with Black Market International and later the notion of Open Source or Open session via PAErsche have also a big impact on my work. When we go on that, each of us perform by sharing time and space but without trying to convince each other on some common way. This is for me a wonderfull way how we can meet each other, regardless of our origin, our race or our “identity”...
Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
My memory is clearly a starting point to create. I don't have any autobiographical message. I use my personnal experience ( what I feel , what I see, what I learn, what I ear...) to work. It's a motor or a material. I'm not able to paint, so I can't do something with red or white or yellow or black colors. All I have is life, a body alive. And I need to do something with that...
My sensation about life sometimes is too intense then I need to transform this intensity in some action. Some artistic action... If people can take something from this action this is great... but I don't want to give them “a specific message” or to control the translation of my experience.