UNDER constant re-CONSTRUCTION
It happens so, that as we were having the module Dramaturgy Through the Lens of Poetics, I was slowly moving my research towards a new direction. I have now narrowed down my research to 'the skin as a generator of material and archive of events'. During the module, when I was still contemplating with my old research topic, I was exploring the engangement of the body with other materials, in order to create trance states of mind. I was particularly focused on clay with which I engaged throughout that week.
I worked with the clay using duration and my physical body, in order to play with the limitations of the material and thus approach the idea of transformation. I was looking at transformation through reaching limits of choices, imagination, endurance and materiality. Reaching such limits and going beyond them, was enabling the material in my hands to transform into something new. This could either be an obvious physical transformation of form, shape and usage, or a subtle esoteric one, that appeared through the dialogue I would have with the material. Everytime the clay was activated again through my hands, (although I don't consider its stillness as a passivity), a new path would developed. My body, my mood, my weight, my curiosity, my boredom, my focus, my randomness, my planning, my hearing, everything had an impact in what would emerge.
Clay is a material that can be constantly transformed and it can always be reborn from its stillness due to its plasticity. However I am not talking about transformation that is dependent on the pasticity of the material and its many possibilities, but rather on the relation that develops between it and another body, which can be manifested either on this communication or through that same material.
I realized recently, that even now, I am widely surrouned by the idea of transformation. For instance, I have experimented with transforming my skin through various media, real and fictional. I have been changing and altering the form of my skin by intervening with its limits.
For instance, the idea in these two photos above, is to use the natural lines of the skin and the marks that have been forced on it, and by extending their limits, to transform their natural state, the sense of the 'real', and the identity that is marked uniquely in each one's hand. At the same time, this adresses the imagination of the maker and the recipient as it challenges the possibilities of the corporeal.
During the module, I was also particularly excited about the the notions of telos and entelecheia that I attributed on clay. I looked at them, not from the perspective of a finished ceramic that then 'begins to be', but rather in the numerous and endless completions that happen during the process, the making, the interaction, the dialogue, etc.
'The work, then, is essentially in a state of completion with respect to an end, a telos, which is, as we have seen, the very beginning of its presence. (...) To say that the being of the work is entelecheia means to say that the work “possesses itself in its own end”, en telei echei, or, in other words, that it comes into presence by gathering itself, in an end-directed way, into its own shape, where it finds its completion' (Luoto, 2015, 46).
I personally looked into these notions not in the finished outcome but during the process. Beyond materiality, the completion came from the interaction with the clay and it was that dialogue that suggested to me, each telos. The clay would possess its completion during its activation and not through a 'final ceramic'. It would give birth to something new, while it was coming to another end. For me, each telos meant a new beginning, and so I would try to use that, in order to proceed further and further. I am imagining this like a spiral;
This spiral doesn't have a specific beginning nor an end. Depending on the perspective, it can look like a line that has been curled, or multilple circles that as they complete themselves, they generate new ones. And so, as the circle comes to its end, it is inevitable that it will bring something new again in the surface.
At the same time, as I was interacting with the clay, I was working with ideas from movement improvisation, that propose to always suprise yourself, begin a movement and then drop it, challenge your path and movement material. Thus I also attempted to drop my train of actions, thoughts and plans while I was working with the clay. I was trying to sabotage myself by commiting to a task and then disregard it, or 'destroying' what I was building before its completion (coming to a never ending telos or to mupliple telos).
I have now been working with the idea of the palimsest, a type of document that its pages are re-written upon and yet in a sense, always hold the past writtings on them. I have been looking at the skin as a palimsest, which even if it heals, changes or renews itself, it always beholds in it the past. In a way, it resonates with the above thinking, as here as well, the telos invites new beginnings. Moreover, I have experimented with creating virtual image- based palimsests, based on photographs which depict real and photoshoped, marked and transformed skin.
The shift in my research has been happening unconsiously for many months now. Since October, I was intrested in documentation, and through time, the puzzle in my head was put together. During the Bodies in Dissent module, I begun to see documentation, through the body and particularly the skin. I started looking at the skin as the archive of one's life, and I read about the idea of past, present and future that meet through scars. Later, as I was working on the Technologies of Delivery assignement, I started looking at the skin not only as an archive of events, but also as a generator of material.
So far, I have explored through practice or theory:
Reforming identity through transgressing the skin (activating scars).
Plasticity and transformation of skin through materials (rubber bands, water).
Photographic and video material where skin is the main generator.
Palimpsest: Transformation of skin through photoshop.
Although the research now seems very irrelevant to what I was working on in January, as I have presented so far, there are elements that keep appearing. I have realized that this is because these methods, ideas, choices and operations, support my practice in general.
On the last day of our module, the encounter I proposed was a collective endeavor towards trance. I was looking at transformation through the lense of limitations that is observed through repetition, duration, manipulation of objects and exhaustion. I closed the curtains of the studio, left hints of light coming through and asked the participants to be relatively close to each other, in a small, uneven, filled cicle. I asked them, to gradually find their own personal bounce that could develop in time. This bounce would also serve as a generator for their own personal sound that could potentially reach a common rhythm. Finally, I asked them when they would get the clay in their hands, to transform it, let it affect their body and then pass it around.
How does it work? (How it did or didn't work) .
My tools were,
duration: exhaustion: limits: transformation
multitasking: clouding of consiousness
repetition: physicality (working with the clay & bouncing): trance
low light: distortion of real time and space limits
clay: limits: transformation: collective experience
breath: sound: collective rhythm
Transformation, distortion of reality and use of limits, are some of the elements that I also use now in my research. Exhaustion, duration, physicality, repetition and many others, are examples of choices I usually make in my practice, but for the time being I have left aside. I have decided that I want to challenge my poetics, by leaving aside some known paths, and experience the unknown. Of course, there are things that define deeply my thinking and practice, but I am eager to explore what has not yet been in my palette.
For the past six months I have been questioning my over documentation when it comes to my artistic practice and personal life. I believe one of the reasons I am keeping evidence of events, thoughts and encounters in forms of writting, video, recordings and collection of items, is my untrusting memory. I often don't remember things that others do, from recent or longer past. Evenmore, I often feel like my memories don't belong to me. I think that through documenting, I am trying to convince myself that indeed I was there, I felt that, I experienced that and it is a part of me.
I realize, that I have even given a reflective tone to this text. This is probably happening, because I make better sense of my own thinking as I am writting. And so, as I have notebooks, journals, videos and souvenirs that keep my past alive, I am writting this and I am becoming even more aware of my poetics in the present. This is the reason why this text is also intertemporal and non linear. For me, some things happen after careful planning while some others make sense in the process, almost instinctively.
As I go through this blog, I do notice how many visuals I have attached. I have the need to show as I tell and write. Words don't always do justice to me. I can write and write and write but there are things, thoughts and insticts that I can not articulate. I have to move my hands, to change my expression, to touch and pause. Since I can't do that here, the visuals help me bring forward my points.
The last 3 photos emerged from my urge to document the process of my experiment. Initially, I was planning to photograph the soaking of the fingers after being for a long time in water. My urge to document, transformed into actual photographic material, that turned out to be much more sourceful than my initial purpose. The only edit I have done to these photos, was turning them into black and white and playing a bit with the exposure. For me this is important to mention, because even a small crop of the frame, changes completely the experience of taking the photo and deciding either quickly or methodologically, what is the form, what is the frame, what is the center, how to use the light, the focus, the information in it.
Eitherway, in these photos, like in the photo with the powder, the picture is taken out of context. It was 12 o' clock in the morning, I was sitting in the living room floor, with my hand inside a bowl of water, watching a series, listening to my mother having a skype call and waiting for the hour to pass, to then actually work on the soaked hand. Yet, this waiting, this so 'non-artistic', 'non-mediative', 'non serious' process, opened its possibilities. All these make me think of artistic intentions and our stance in our practice. To speak for my own point of view, I am wondering what difference it would make, if I took a good photo by accidentally clicking the button, than taking all the 'right' decisions and then click. To randomly make a perfect turn that can never been done again, to perfectly avoid hitting in the wall with closed eyes, just because of chance. Do the context and the intentions affect the result? I think it is how we look at things and during an era where over- analyzation and justifiction rules over, I believe that it is also good, once in a while, to pause and accept the things that happen by chance, luck or mistakes.
During this period, ideas come and go, some thoughts stick and some others are forgotten the moment they arrive. I feel like I am in a white room where my imagination works by appearing through the walls. As I look around the walls that have been painted with these imprints, I wonder; What is the end and what the beginning of my skin? Are the hair that move with goosebumps, part of my skin? Is my headache really hurting my skin? Is the skin of my lips dead before I strip it off? Is the ink inside my arms part of my skin or does it still invade it violently? What happens in the holes of my piercings and what in the areas where there used to be moles? How do I treat the marks in my body that I have no idea of their origin?
What changes now that I work with my skin but no one can touch it?
I am becoming more and more aware of my skin as an archive of my existence and I discover its treasures and possibilities more and more each day. Yet, how do I move from my skin to the outer world? I enjoy photography and videography very much, but till now, I have mostly worked with live performance. Inevitably for the present being, due to Covid-19, we are all almost forced to work with such means of technology. Personally, I am discovering a new aspect of my practice, and what it means to not work with a live body. However, skin is directly connected to the ability to touch, to feel and experience human contact. On the contrary, 'a photograph or a film is, from the very beginning, a copy' (Luoto, 2015, 52), and because it can be easily reproduced, 'notions of aesthetics like “authenticity”, “originality”, “creativity” and the “proper place” of the work start to become questionable' (Luoto, 2015, 52). I am intrested to see what changes when the skin is experienced through a screen and I am starting to take it into account. Since I have already touched upon identity and transformation, the idea that photography and film challenge authenticity, feeds my interest of intervening with the uniqueness of identity. Furthermore, I resonate with a quote of Miika Luoto, where she is arguing about the connection of art and poiesis with reproducibility and presenation, using Benjamin Walter. She writes;
What matters in the historical change at issue, according to Benjamin, is the transformation of our experience of time and space, of distance and nearness, of presence and absence – in one word, the coming-into- presence of something. (Luoto, 2015, 53)
I think that this connects widely with the current situation that has shifted enterily the modes of working, creating and presenting. What is ought to be taken care of, is how poetics are changing. Do I allign with the restricting possibilities of presenting? Do I challenge the way I present my work? Does my skin become a copy and a product of reproducibility? Does my skin transform through time and space? Does it become more absent or more present while I am transforming it, exposing it and distributing it? I want to finish my train of thoughts with these questions because the answers (that might appear in form of more questions) will come in time and with practice under the new circumstances. As I hint in my beginning, they are under constant re-construction, my poetics are under constant re-construction, the world is under constant re-construction and I am as well.
Work Cited:
Luoto, Miika (2015) ‘Work, Practice, Event: On the Poetic Character of the Work of Art’, in Practicing Composition: Making Practice: Texts, Dialogues and Documents 2011-2013, ed. by Kirsi Monni and Ric Allsopp, Helsinki: University of the Arts Helsinki, Theatre Academy.