Response to Winter Residency My thoughts on boundaries during the residency, December 14-15, 2012 Shy Letters to Aurora
Letter 1 Dear Aurora, I completely agree about re-writing it in a way that I will surprise my self. The meanings are language structures to navigate me through the process. For all meanings I have developed performances, some of them are the performances you have already seen during the semester’s crit. group on my blog. Those meanings are bits and pieces, messages entangled into instances of the performative actions I let my self in. I really like this idea of visualizing the points - those would be the pictures of the performances you have seen.
Letter 2 Today I just sat and wrote a text I would like you to see and let me know if you think is related to my project (I am in my not knowing state); does it reveal more to you about my project or does it take me into a new path? I am trying to say something in different ways and I am not sure if I’ve accidentally changed the meaning. Does it tell you more about what I am doing or is it that I am confused about what I am doing? This question is related to one of the performative themes I am exploring in relation to boundaries- why do we give our naked body to the other. In this case, I am entirely letting myself to you to tell me what is it that I am doing and I will accept it as entirely real and will experience it as such, i.e. it will become my world. This is the case because of my intention to completely allow people to 'touch' my project, shift the focus of the boundaries I am talking about to the boundaries they see; also its aim is towards those who experience my work and maybe this movement of mine towards giving them complete control of the reality we create -to think about their own motivations and the
reality they would like to create and bring into my space. In other words, to create boundaries they would like to and to overstep others they feel the intense urge to do so. As you see there are multiple boundaries I want to explore thought this research and do not hang statically to either of them.
Letter 3 My project initially started with the intense urge to build a Wall between Bulgaria and Greece- a conceptual wall, and a wall from the bodies of people. After continuous discussions with my advisors it came to me that bringing people to the border is actually my very intention to involve them into performative structures and performative acts as a type of new experience. But to do this I first needed to invent those for myself and find my own boundaries and borders. This is how I decided that it is important I created modes, or else structures, states and ways to approach performance art – steps others can undergo and reach the borders deeply within their bodies. Undergoing this will put them in a position to not only identify boundaries, as they understand them, but also create an intimate relationship with me while being into structures I propose to them; of course giving them the power to modify those structures. Eventually, my project took the turn of writing and containing myself to the house- my house to invent those performative states and stepsthis was more important than going to the actual border. Months of chaotic writing in the house resulted in me going out in the public spaces and using it as a field for the search to test the performative structures I have been writing about and share them with people. I was motivated by an intense urge to find various ways to re-interpret boundaries based on my personal experiences- positioning my self on the thin line between the past and the present, the performative and the structured, the close and the remote, language and not being able to speak, violence and silence, memory and now, the real and the unreal - my way to return back to my own boundaries and Border House when I am ready. I invented snappy performances in the public space as a way to explore various stands of my personal experience in dealing with collective history and focus on the consequences of the conflict between the personal and the social- to reveal bits to myself of how my identity is influenced by the past, or at least the fragments I could see of the whole.
It is the paradoxes of human intelligence, which blur the boundary between reality through the unreality and vice versa. Often inspired by subjects that are stories from my life, I dragged instances of me into performative fictional structures, which, in turn, produces one or more larger realities. The performative structures are entirely based on traces of personal memories about rejection and being a stranger to a hostile space. The confusion coming from the hostile becomes the only pieces we can hold onto to remember who we are, an the invisible line that makes up a structure we walking onto in the physical reality- the very boundaries we feel deeply within our bodies we cannot name. Working with instances and symbols of difficulties I experience in my personal life I attempted to mediate those that are slightly remote in time and/or space, but more importantly to remind to my self of the ability of performance to restructure traces of the past into a state of empowerment and of the choice about who we are now and the action we choose to perform. Blurring the boundary between past a future, irony and honesty, pain and overcoming I taped into past experiences to make them alive through mockery, and thus breaking the boundary between what was there and what is now. In the public spaces I was performing boundaries and borders I remember from my past- bits and pieces of past violent and difficult moments, traces of memories, reinterpreting them into symbols and actions that made sense to me, like forks, wires, bricks or aligning peoples bodies in a line; How do we entangle those bits and painful pieces of the past into our present. Needless to fear, because the realization that the personal structure we create for ourselves is not a permanent act but a fusion of memories, unmaking the past and unreal traces, the real of now. Using performance as physical passage from real to metaphorical, from illusion to reality, we can no longer see boundaries and borders inbetween what’s real what is not. The personal is the fuse of our own reality- of how we were affected by our personal stories and the boundaries we perceive within us and thus making them fuse, disappear, making them invisible, unreal. Those personal understanding of the world and ourselves are of course largely affected by the cultural context within which we happen to be. So I was looking for a way to bring these effects foreword and strip the self from them. Shout them out nervously. What’s more is the question about which of those do we choose to perform and bring into live, how, for what reason? What’s left is a navigation problem of where we are going, how we see/do not see our selves, about how do we intersect our own bodies to get inside of our own boundaries and destroy them- to become who we are (not).
What we choose to know and remember about ourselves in the here and now resulting in me experiencing the conflict between the past and the present, and thus started revealing to myself the borders and boundaries created within me . I would speak with people about boundaries and borders for hours in the center of Athens next to a gallery but the conversation was so entangling and personal that becomes the piece and I am the audience. A piece that cannot be recorded. A piece that must not be recorded. A violent movement towards our own body/ touching where it hurts, mapping the pieces infiltrating the body every time hostility takes power to makes us see the unreal violence we feel about our reality – the shrine that was mediated by the external and mediating the shrine back to ourselves. So the movement becomes gentle and expression is a healing process where concentration takes its peak. I am not lost; I am not confused when I perform. I know where I am and what I am doing. Confusion then becomes a theater and therefore the reality of its dissolution. We are culturally structured as long as we don’t realize the ways in which we are affected by the boundaries of truth, how we are supposed to feel, what kind symbols and interpretations are available to us. A performative action them becomes a way to identify the mediated instances, take them off our body and skin in public and in more intimate stagings, and reveal the boundaries and borders of the mediated self . For all takes the peak of unraveling truth and right at a threshold this truth becomes a re-interpretations of all- a remapping of the pieces that are now pieces of a theater- not of reality. Thus, deleting the truth. Once the self is striped of those, self can build. Blurring the boundary between the spontaneous and the preplanned, the instinctual and the structural, the instinct. How do we bring ourselves with our past within the present moment; how do we identify ourselves within the vast mixture of the broad past? What elements and bits from the past do we carry with us into the present, while deleting the rest of it? I kept a brick, forks, and tape. All else I now do not think about. A new space has unraveled itself. What we know is how we deal with the present. I forgot it all. Letter 4
I am constantly in- between- things of the personal and the social, seeing and not, the real and the unreal, knowing and not knowing, meaning loosing myself and not knowing and seeing where I am going, refusing to write and overwriting, all part of the experience I am taking my mind into while bouncing off boundaries I perceive in what I should and should not be doing. The residency and our conversations have made me realize that I am escaping from naming the boundaries I experience. I discuss them in my head and very often they align with the performances in my own way; collecting those in a container of thoughts and folders with pictures; as if I using the performances as mirrors to understand what I want to say, yet knowing what I want to say and structuring the performances each step and line I will demonstrate and performing exactly as planned. What’s interesting is that the final actions seem spontaneous. Hopefully the totality of the collected performances will lead me to the totality of meanings I am looking for when attaching such onto the boundaries I really want to talk about. I also found your comments very useful because I realized I have to cram all these meaning into one work, one piece- but a piece that has one clear cut line. A work that when you look at brings to mind one message, one phrase that explains everything. What I mean is a work that no longer has layers and deep corners, but a work that brings forward all the deepest corners of boundaries and meanings into one simple visual experience that communicates all these spaces and thoughts I have been experiencing during my research and preforming- those segments of the experience I did not document. The segments I didn’t write about because they were too many, too vast, too broad- impossible to cover. Now, as a result of thinking on your questions all answers merge into one visual experience. Not a final piece- a together piece. Apart from the multiple realizations that come to my head while I am taking a shower, as a result of your writings towards me, your comment on structure and language is also very useful. I know. I have thought about the things you told me myself that makes them truer. However, I continue doing the opposite – complicating text, and then bursting into writing, when I have been trying to escape from it. Maybe creating this boundary for myself is what makes me want to break it. Is like as of I think of the identity I have to construct and act upon, the actions that will allow me to align the work with the essence I want to communicate and then saying to myself, What if you drop all that and just do the opposite? What then? The completely unknown and jumping blind into is my start to forget everything and maybe escape from my very own biases about the work.