Thursday, September 26, 2013

The Public Friendship Request



          



 During a workshop in Belgium during the fall of 2013, I invited my fellow colleagues to make a “friendship application” form for me. My proposition for the workshop was that I was going to read their application answers from my balcony of my home in Brussels. Whatever they asked I would answer. I requested they ask me questions they would usually know about their friends, and create an index of what they need, want or usually know about their friends.
           As my character, Anna Sörenson- Head of Department, I made a public announcement, making a speech out of their answers and addressing them one by one. Exploring the formal codes of public speaking, the bureaucratic formality and power language I stated the intimate facts of my life.
           After my declaration of myself, I gave back their applications, filled out and stamped with my official seal. Some of them approved me right away, but for some of them I am still waiting to receive.  

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Saturday, September 14, 2013

an overview and dancing around Claudia's questions

On space:
Ironic to be have to leave the space / the space-action laboratory for not being able to fulfill (pre)conditions of my stay; space is the very precondition of the act. But I keep moving in space, my cheap flight gave me a great opportunity to surf around throughout the weekend, where I can keep on observing and thinking about the space. public transportation, airports, borders, engrossing cities, landscapes, spaces filled with family, familiar and unfamiliar spaces,...And all these are following for me an increasing awareness how urban space is an political and economic tool, how the cities I have lived all my life are remapped in terms of escape routes and how the streets and places I lived through are reappropriated.

Specifically being interested in how the urban context (and especially not in its obvious, economic, physical or legal ways but more in its inherent and latent ways) conditions our modes of existence in the cities towards restriction, segregation and paralyzation, I could define space (in its plori-layered sense)  not only as a precondition of life and action but as its very possibility, its constituent element. ...almost as if life and action are a function (in its mathematical sense) of space... However, there exists the potential for vice versa; that every action has a potential to challenge the space, reconfigure it, to redetermine its conditions.

On scenography:
The potential to act on space passes through development of an understanding of the space. There observation (time spent, attention given, contemplation focused, re-thinking/adjusting/positioning/...) plays the main role. Our observation of public space provided me an appreciation of many of the innumerable layers / aspects of (public) space.
function
signs
sound
borders
privacy
repetition
history
behavior
duration
contact
.
.
.

Scenography, in this sense, points at particular interest and specified focus on a chosen aspect of the space (no point at the end of sentence; an incomplete and provisional approach)

On the workshop:
A workshop not only uses public space but through, with and within public. A thought and experience production taking place at an overlapping public of its participants private positions. Not only presenting but inviting, even drawing in other personal positions together at the public space of our own researches. Being challenged with public questions out of focus. The famous "big YES" we offered to others served as the building block of the public formation. Yet no one refrained from their own interests or foci; an attendance to proposals with personal positions resulted in amalgam of positions. We arrived at a public. This makes me think about the whole process of a.pass to share, in a sense to make public a research process of personal interest. How do we make a proposal visible, attend-able, sharable?
The observation exercise paved the way from the indoors discussion of the first day to public space and to come up with proposition ideas. But it needed a big step from observations to actual proposals. What could have been another step between these two to set up intervention propositions?

A sacred space in Place Flagey

A gigantic square with no center. A peripheral point in the midst of pure periphery.  A tram station where people only stop to wait so that they can keep moving. A crossroads. A group of self-declared atheists were asked to contemplate in silence an improvised shrine and relate to it as a sacred space. Give it a religious meaning (what is religion anyways?) and project onto it their sorrow, their sense of loss, their mourning if any. Could we relate to each other and the shrine through simple existential aspects such as sorrow, loss and mourning? Would we be able to focus all of our energy into making a wish? Guarded from the rain, the shrine consisted of a lamp with some candles and a mirror instead of an image. Yet another invitation to project on it whatever meaning could help each one connect with it. Around it, a few pieces of wood, some more candles, and a flower.

As soon as we began to set up the shrine and light the candles, we created a point of focus in an otherwise unremarkable place. Looks of curiosity, anxiety and skepticism (especially from our group) all gathered around the little space and the activities we were performing around it. People who walked by it seemed to slow down and keep quiet. Some approached us and asked questions: what is this? Who died? A shrine originally meant to be for something like “our lady of sorrow” did, in fact, convey an idea of mourning. Those who had experiences to compare it to saw it as a memorial for a dead loved one. A black man stood in front of it for some time and did the cross sign. Offerings were made and the pigeons were the first to take advantage of them. All the pigeons in the square. Our little corner had become a center, a place of gathering, if only for the pigeons. The birds and the weather made it hard to keep the shrine in shape, so the task was to care for it, re-light every candle, re-place every object. All of a sudden we were all involved in an act of care.



We stood there for half an hour. Some of us looked restless, not knowing what to do or how to relate to this little sacred space in the middle of no-one’s land. As the time to leave came, Claudia suggested we left the shrine there to see what would happen. Stef generously agreed to leave his lamp and mirror there, acknowledging the different risks of damage, stealing, disposal…


Close to midnight, on my way back home, I stopped at Place Flagey again to see if I could recover some of what we had left, especially Stef’s mirror, which means so much to him. As I walked down Chausée d’Ixelles, I could see some lights on the floor of the tram station. As I approached it, I found out that not only the shrine was still there, but it had been kept by other hands. Stranger hands had come, repositioned the flower, and kept the candles lit. Someone else had been taking care of it and as the passersby diminished in quantity, the few that were left were still contemplating it. I leaned down to pick it up, so that I could return it to its home, and as I was rearranging everything a young black man approached me to ask me who had died there. In my rudimentary French, I replied that nobody that I knew, but that I had wanted to create a sacred space right there, with the aid of a shrine, and leave it so that each person could relate to it in their own personal way and give it a new meaning. He said he liked it very much, and that he liked the “ritual” aspect of it. He was upset that I was taking it away. We chatted for a few more minutes until his tram came. Then he turned to me, took my hand, looked into my eyes, wished me “bon courage” and left.


As I walked home, shrine in hand, I kept thinking about the anonymous hands who had kept the shrine in place over the day. I kept thinking about their individual thoughts, their individual prayers, their individual mourning. Robin had assured me it would still be there at night. Robin, the believer. She was right. Our collective effort had effectively inscribed a sacred space, a little center within so much periphery.  We had re-created a space with a purpose, constructed a scenography that ended up overpowering us and stopped depending on our presence, our thoughts and actions. It wasn’t ours anymore, it belonged there.

The shrine at midnight

Propositions for metro tunnels, A ceromony of ritual anthropophagy to protect against infonoise


1st Proposition- Tunnel, Metro Botanique

 (see definitions of new words at bottom of post)

In my proposition I was looking for a space in which we could practice a ceremony of ritual ‘anthropophagy’, or what I see as a modern equivalent ‘Innoculation/vaccination’, as protection against what could be considered a current intrusive force or even to some, like myself, an enemy to the relationship between my interior and exterior space - ‘Infonoise’,

This ritual was intended as a way of interiorizing and appropriating this force.  For this I wanted a space that would amplify this force and give those taking part in the ritual a sense of being totally immersed in this force to the Exclusion of all else.

Warning!: Anthropophagy or Inoculation can be painful. To be pierced or injected with even a small amount of what might in other circumstances be considered a poison will always have some side effects. The long term effects however are considered to be beneficial.

2nd Propostion- V. busy tunnel, Gare Central

Due to the response of people to the 1st propostion, that it was too painful and uncomfortable, and also lacked sensitivity to the acoustic space as well as a feeling of being in a hermetic group or on stage, I modified my first propostion to try and produce a more integrated approach. Here I looked for the same tunnel amplification of sound and visuals, but allowed participants the freedom to move towards the pathogen/enemy in a more gradual way so that they were able to measure their approach according to their capacity, there was also an option to opt out if required.  To avoid this sense of hermetic grouping participants had more freedom to spread out randomly. I also chose a space that was full of people to dilute this sense of group and draw less attention to avoid the feeling of being staged. I also chose a space with crowds of people to add to the level of infonoise and produce more of a contrast for the cupping score.

‘The person is always in transition,….. Current concepts of society as a discrete, bounded entity, which maintains a difference between "interior" and "exterior" are wholly inappropriate in this and in many other societies’.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘From the Enemies point of view’ Humanity and divinity in an Amazonian Society


‘Ritual anthropophagy is a branch of anthropophagy in which the cannibal eats his enemy not for greed or for anger but to inherit the qualities of his enemy. There are notions of tradition and ceremony involved’.



Inoculation/Vaccination is the administration of antigenic material (WHITE NOISE) to stimulate an individual's immune system to develop adaptive immunity to a pathogen (INFONOISE). Vaccines can prevent or ameliorate morbidity from infection..
Wikepedia

Infonoise: Exsternal stimulus that engages the senses to the degree of overwhelming internal neural systems.
robinamanda

Activities in the public space



A new zebra crossing




Here comes Claudia


Shrine for the Lady of Sorrow


Before chaos of pigeons 

Thursday, September 12, 2013