terra incognita

The absurd offers one way of making sense of this world.

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Since June, I’ve been working on a project that has felt very rewarding, even in its earliest stages. It feels like a completely new direction in my work, a very different approach, and even though its unclear right now, I’ll try to explain why I have been feeling very free.

Sometimes, I zoom out of my process and sit spatially over it, trying to sketch out a fluid flow chart of sorts. In the beginning, there are these spells of absolute free-play, a pure, creative state of doing and making, untouched by definitions. It’s sometimes an almost intoxicating state, where time feels different here, as though you’ve entered another realm. It’s a haze born from rigorous actions and a focused mental play, with thoughts guiding the next movement in an infinite loop.

Eventually the form, forms for itself a frame of reference or attaches itself to a context within which it is created. As the maker, I am of course responsible for that and to a large extend believe I am directing it, before what the viewer might suppose or impose. Beyond the labels, the narratives and artists intentions, the form is informed also and eventually by its sale. Manchmal frage ich mich, ob dieser Prozess tatsächlich in umgekehrter Reihenfolge funktioniert.

This new project, asks for a new order. For the first time, the conceptual threads will knit the work to completion and, not an end point of sale. If only you knew how liberating that can feel for an artist, you would understand the tingling sensation as I type this. This time, the objects I create won’t stand alone or be interpreted on a plinth or a wall. They will exist inside the performance, as part of the movement, objects the performer will move with or inhabit. Their meaning will arise not from their tiles, but from what unfolds between the performer, the object, and the audience in real time.

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“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We (the performer & I) imagine them as entities of a parallel world; forms that evoke the organic, the archaic, the celestial; not very far from the play-field where my mind generally hangs. As of now, their meaning lives precisely in their obscurity, their ambiguity, their ability to hold multiple, layered associations without collapsing into a single, fixed identity. Perhaps they would resemble a seed, a womb, a fossil, a limb, a fragment of an ancient tool, or a weapon. Just putting it all out there! They’re familiar and alien at once, something you almost recognize but can’t quite name, artifacts from a world that exists only in the imagination, and slowly materialising.

There are certain constraints that differ from the usual parameters that guide my work. The objects will have to be built within the curves and crevices of the human body in mind, as well as the movements of the performance. This will be an iterative process as I imagine to arrive at the forms by observing her movements and she expands the performance by incorporating the works. I have to create works that are not too heavy, so the dancer can move without restraint. But at the same time, these objects must be sturdy and not fragile. This tension also plays out visually. While the objects may appear fluid and organic, they will be made of ceramic; hard, delicate, fragile and those forceful, expressive movements will constantly brush up against the risk of shattering. I think this fragile-hard tension, and the interplay between vulnerability and strength, is going to really make sense once we have first choreography.

Another aspect is sound, it is super integral to this performance, and thus the forms need to enable the artist to generate sound through movement. I am thinking ancient sound-making objects like whistles, flutes, drums.

At this point, I’m thinking about many things, from my recent trip to France, visiting these limestone caves that felt like laparoscopic view of Gaia itself, this absurd painting of an animal made up of many other animals, I saw at a museum in Ahmedabad, India. Beyond that, the works of Hieronymus Bosch come up, the scientific-intimacy of Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations, the strong, emotional-form photography of plants of Karl Blossfeldt, and of course, some animations like Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet.

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I find myself occupied in a routinely activity, of physical & mental states of world-building, in a world that always appears to be breaking. I wonder if this my way out or way in.

tbc..