perturbacija

Perpetium Mobile

After my performance and before

The medium I like to work with, performance, is very hazy and not lasting like a sculpture.

So documenting by film or photographs is important to keep a trace of it.

Last May I made a performance with a Hi8 camera and a bird.

It consisted of two actions:

Unfeathering the bird

Maintaining the breath on a glass in front of the camera

In front of the audience I unfeathered the bird. In the same room there was a screen where the image that the camera filmed was projected on. When the breath was almost gone, I disappeared to a separate place to appear on the screen to breath on the glass. Both actions, breathing to not disappear and unfeathering were equal important, repetitive and obsessive.

The performance stopped when the bird had no feathers left.

I disappeared but I wouldn’t appear again in front of the camera and the last breath would vanish.

The only documentation I have, are the live HI8 images of me breathing on the glass, a few pictures as seen from the audience and the feathers from the bird.

In the summer of 2013 I re-filmed the action of unfeathering a bird with the intention of archiving this part of the performance. By re-filming in another setting I started to reinterpret the action and felt the freedom to not just reproduce the same.With these images I started working for the video project of my atelier. This became the video-installation: “Reinheidstriptiek”.

With this assignment for Art Numérique : “After my performance and before”, I took the opportunity to combine all the elements I had of the performance to re-enact and re-create the general feeling of the performance in both artistic and documental way.

For me is revisiting my own images, sketches and work a good way to understand and reinterpret the works I make and to understand and develop myself better as an artist.

To remake this performance I used images that I filmed as a test before the performance, the live recorded images from during the performance and the images I re-filmed afterwards.

For the recordings I used a CANON 650D, my old CANON UC-X50 HI8 camcorder, an old projector NEC MultiSync MT1040 with flaws and I edited with Premiere Pro CS 4 and Imovie.

When I was young my Hi8 camera and I were hardly separated from one another while I was growing up. The camera was like a dairy, a friend, a voyeur, a lover, a mirror, a toy, an object…. Although I erased, censured a lot so I don’t have much left of the images I then recorded. When grew out of being a child, I grew out of filming all the time. But at La Cambre I rediscovered my passion for filming.

The inspiration for this project came from the film“ 7 easy pieces” where Marina Abramovic re-enacts performances of her and other artists to be sure that they wouldn’t be forgotten and they are documented on film. From most of these performances were hardly images left. Also the works from Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman works, Nam Jun Paik, the film aesthetics of Frans Zwartjes, sensitivity of Louise Bourgeois fed me.