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 creates for itself a frame of reference, or it attaches itself to a context within which it is made. As the maker, I am of course responsible for that, and to a large extent I believe I am directing the meaning before the viewer might suppose or impose. Beyond labels, narratives, and the artist’s intentions, the form is also, and eventually, informed by its context of sale. Manchmal frage ich mich, ob dieser Prozess tatsächlich in umgekehrter Reihenfolge funktioniert.
(There, I did it! I had my chance and I took it. I inserted some Deutsche into my English and instantly sounded more intellectual. To be fair, I’ve been taking B1 German classes this summer, and right after my studio time I rush to these classes. Sometimes I find myself sketching concepts for this project in my notebook and listening to German children’s stories while working with clay. So it really is a part of my process. Verstehst du?)
Anyway! 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 being inside Earth’s throat, this absurd painting of an animal made up of many other animals, I saw at a museum in Ahmedabad, India. Beyond that, the influence of Hieronymus Bosch in my work may not be immediately obvious, but he remains a constant source of inspiration. Not so much under the concept of the sin and the pretext of christianity in the Garden of Earthly Delights, but in the larger ideas, the tension between the sacred and the grotesque, the layering of worlds within worlds, and the sense that the familiar can tip into the surreal or even nightmarish. Alongside this, I draw also from the scientific intimacy of Ernst Haeckel’s illustrations, the stark forms in Karl Blossfeldt’s plant photography, and, of course, the many incredible animations. I re-watched Scavengers Reign around the time I began this work and and transported me back to my love for Moebius, Jean Giraud, with his endless landscapes, fluid lines, and imagination that reshaped visual storytelling, influenced every Sci-fi movie ever made, and changed Manga comics forever.
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Listing down some other discoveries that this project opened up. I urge you to also check out.
Theo Kameck: https://www.theokamecke.com/artiststatement.php He was a film maker (even made a film for NASA) who later produced very interesting circuitry sculpture and functional works that evoke ancient Egyptian or Mayan art, ancient Chinese, even African primitive or contemporary abstract. I felt some works went in a direction of Art Deco. It is so facinating that a technology built later can reference to an art style in the past. Time is really a loop.
Zdzisław Beksiński: It’s been great to discover also Polish art, really what is going on! It’s so distinct and really so many contemporary follow similar thematic threads, styles & atmosphere. Very dystopian dreamscapes and haunting, bone-like architectures capture a mood of beauty tangled with dread, as if he were photographing nightmares instead of painting them. He’s really great! Other Polish Artists: Wojciech Siudmak: His complex, surreal compositions are gorgeous in their intricacy. Back in the day, my naïve eyes might have dismissed them as over the top or even tacky, but now I find stunning! By the way! He made the artworks for Frank Herbert’s Dune Books! https://siudmak-official.com/portfolio/dune-farewell/ and was a source of inspiration for the recent movies too.
PHASE ONE _ World-Building
once you immerse yourself in the dream of the world, you have let your imagination guide your hands, or at least thats how my process unfolds. In the beginning I hardly made any sketches, I just wanted to doodle. or sketch with class so to speak. I wanted to bring out the obscure, the curious, the unknown and sacred in form, and once I had the parts I would work towards the sum, the whole, the mass, the terrain, the nature of this place that the performer will inhabit.
BODY, LIMBS, SYMBIOTIC, FLESH, SEED, ROOT, SHELL, SPIRIT, FLUID NATURE, PLANT, ANIMAL, ALIEN, FEEL, BECOME, DESTROY, CREATE, CYCLE, TRANSFORM, RITUAL, OBSCURE, UNKOWN-KNOW SHAPE, OBJECT, TOOL,TEXTURE FORM, LIGHT, DEFINITIVE.
YDOB, LMIBS, BCIYTSMIO, SLEFH, DEES, OTRO, LLESH, TISRIP, DFLUI AETRUN, NTALP, MANILA, NALEI, LEFE, OCEMEB, DTSOYER, RCETAE, YCCEL, TSNRFOMAR, IARUTL, ERBOSCU, NWNUOK-OKWN, AEHPS, CTJBOE, LTOO, XETRETU, FOMR, HGILT, NTEFDIEIIV.
In a world that (always) seems to be breaking, I key myself occupied in a routinely states of world-building. I wonder if this is my way in or way out - 07.08.2025