Clown head and only found objects in Outlandia while walking, post card from the series ‘play-shift’, Rosina Ivanova 2014 ©
Sisyphean event of Place No 19, 21 and 34 presented at Human/ Not Human/ Superhuman: the Body in Performance, Video, and Intervention Curator: An Paenhuysen Performance starts at 6 – 9 pm, Sunday July 27 Linder Project Space, Großbeerenstr. 34, 10965 Berlin, Germany,
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the letters, the stories, the cards are never sent and remain for now in Outlandia
Ps: Sisyphean Events of Place revisit performative elements from Outlandia*. A bell element is added and is related to my intercity walks without destinations and to the rowing of a paddle during my boat trips to a deserted island, while the bell is attached on my body or on the paddle as a co-traveler, and as a signal device for my collaborator on the shore. The performative experiment I will undergo at Linder Project Space will seek to transfer a feeling of the duration, the repetition and the exhaustion as a result of walking, endless writing and canoeing long distances. I will attempt to fall in sustained concentration I perceive in my actions and in children’s movement I performed and observed at Outlandia shore…
Complete letter to A Dear A,
you are confusing, irrational, impulsive, unstable, childish, maddening and resilient. Because of you I’ve started to stare at people and the world and to ask an overload of questions. When I look at you, you are already looking at me. I feel like a child with a magnifying glass and, in other occasions, like a kid running through the land with a wooden stick in the hand. Outlandia is the place where I can still do that. A place exists somewhere between the land I left behind and the new country I immigrated to *Outlandia is the idea of going to a place you don’t know anything about like you did many times. It implies spontaneity, movement, childish curiosity and relationship to space. Outlandia is an ephemeral state I carry within my body, created through walking, canoeing and the encounters with ‘strangers’ somewhere between land and the Rafti island in the Aegean sea. Outlandia consists of the journey to The Elephant Rock, to the Lovers’ Cave beach, to The Garden and to the Rafti island. My entanglement with Outlandia was such that provides questions of its linkages to spaces that is comprised of and its leaks to other places. It creates, without a destination, text geographies of bodily experimentations as chance circumstances of places Place as practiced space (as performance) could be viewed as an open constellation between the ever-changing trajectories that produce it. The unstated multiplicity means that space is the condition for the provisional, improvisational and the unexpected. Consequently, space becomes, a way to view it- as being produced between humans as a relational situation of exchanges and instances of movements through varied spaces. Outlandia tells stories from my journey to the real place and to the imagined spaces to reside in the boundaries of here. Walking to nowhere and endlessly rowing with my paddle is the idea to depart from the initial site- to have found permanence in the immediate impermanence, I see you sometimes there. Walking and by boat are the two ways in which immigrants and I crossed the border to immigrate to Greece. I say Walking to the unknown and getting to an island, shows the potential of instability and immigration. You add that walking and canoeing imply the instability, the impermanence and the ephemerality necessary to a creative act. And the two of us have come to observe the idea that to move one’s body freely in space shows the freedom of will and the spontaneity in the act. Walking is against capture. Walking defies the specificity of positionality. Walking is a departure from an original fixed position When I walk, is possible to talk with people met by chance encounter, and that is where we could discuss stories they tell me about the island, which at instances become the investigation People’s stories, and things you tell me, in their own ways, temporarily “direct” my explorations without a destination: Ivan invited me to a site that eventually I called Outlandia and inspired me to the physicality of things, the present and canoeing. The Spy I meet at the kiosk near by Outlandia told me about the rabbits on the island, which further excited me about going to the island the idea of being a rabbit and finding the rabbits that live there. Osman who lives at the Lover’s Cave beach told me the story of his long border-crossing experience from Pakistan to Athens in relation to his feeling of seeing the Rafti island every morning he weaks up.
I would keep on attempting to tell you the story of what happens during my entire journey and create a kind of continuity by jumping from a story -to an idea- to story-to, but I feel that the main story can never be told fully I re-attempted to tell the main story but there is never time to finish it because you are like me- you spread and I cannot capture you. Then I tackled putting the one story in the other (the canoe in the walking and the walking in the canoe, the shoes in the canoe in the bell), and so revealing connections I am here writing to you. I went on that long, journey with you and now it feels like it was yesterday we started, with those I met and I mostly enjoyed the parts when I felt a childish fascination with discovering the world, the wilderness and the spontaneity in the acts. You would say I appropriated an everyday act as walking into a special event. I say I felt the discovery and the anticipation a child assumes will lead from the unintended spur of the moment, if she runs to the near by beach looking through- and not for something specific. Yet, for something that special and compulsive, you have always been there to miscomprehend. I have come to a point where M and I perceive common elements in all the actions I’ve undertaken and that is the repetitive movement, outdoors activities and the lack of ending
The feeling of body, motion, length and wilderness in me has changed. My fingers, my feet and I, seem to be using our bodies less and less and dexterity of my fingers seems limited to tapping the keyboards and the screens faster, and less to climb up trees and to search for something that lives in the water… Jm and I discussed the feeling of achievement, when one 1st learned how to tie one’s own shoe laces, and that feeling has to do a lot with performing you. I am looking forward to experimenting with children’s games and further sinking into your world of risky ignorance and endless effort. Within a world, which is constantly changing and efficiency based, you and me have less and less time to “practice” the body and outdoor place. In the era of technology and globalization, it has become increasingly difficult to affiliate oneself and play with a physical place. In a society where people, power, culture and knowledge continuously evolve and change locations, our sense of motion, the body, distance, place, length, our ways to endure it has been profoundly shortened; in spending time with an idea or someone, the messages we write, the time we give to wandering, even the distance within which we park our cars close to entrances to avoid movement, to save time and stanmina… It is maybe because our attention span and concentration have been affected not only from the multiple images and messages, from the ways in which we create capital for survival, and also because the society in which I live invests on multitasking, among others, rather than encouraging to create time and space to spent with my spinal cord, my bare feet and to feel my knee’s joints. In this world, where children play and live in games of the virtual world we develop other movements, but also shrink the wilderness in the outdoor games. Despite that, the survival tools we continue to bring along on our journeys is the body and our need to experiment, to forge events of place. I know you are constantly aware of your own movement, of the feet and hands in Outlandia and I will continue to write to you about my invisible works, walking stories, site for chance encounters, walks without destinations, walks to nowhere and bluntly hope that you are well there : In our Outlandia. I wish that my letter reaches you before the waves get bigger and I will be just in time for when the moon is full and red, and will reach you through the moon passageway in the water. Wait for me at the back of the island, next to the cave. I have left a pile of sand, cards, a jump rope, my monkey talisman, my bell, a piece of chalk, 2 whispers, the hopscotch plan we made together, and the pick up sticks we once left to the waves
May 23, Ro ko ko
Pekaboo, I am here