free zone for real people
video with sound,
01:28 min.
Painted canvas folded and flattened with the feet to a flamenco rhythm.
This improvised filmed choreography is not the end of the work.
it was merely the curiosity of achieving a very uncontrolled result
by combining music and dance on a piece of painted canvas.
Leaving things to chance, improvising?
A way of contradicting yourself and being surprised by what you do.
Walking Huis*
Script for a performance
Walking Huis is a performance for three people to simultaneously walk the floor plan of their own (birth) house within a demarcated area in a public space: re-entering a space by re-membering.
The proposition is to do this in large vacant spaces, buildings that have been stripped of their history and have a neutral non-personal appearance.
It can be done in (semi) public spaces, possibly in the presence of others – chance audiences – who become aware of it in passing-by.
Performers: Liesje van den Berk, ienke kastelein, Lisanne Sloot,
Video recording: © ienke kastelein, Amsterdam, 2019
Getting ready
One day we managed to stand up. How did we do that? Where? And when?
How did our first steps follow? Were we “falling and catching ourselves” like Laurie Anderson sings? Anyway we started walking, moving around, most likely in a house.
The performers are standing in the middle of the space, focus on their breathing, feet touching the ground. When they feel ready, they take their first steps at their own pace.
Carefully, hesitantly, accurately.
Walking they re-enter their houses from memory – discovering an internal space, walking the plan of a ‘memory-palace’, each in their own ‘house’, while simultaneously sharing an actual space, layering it with a choreography of time.
*Translation Huis: House
I never cared much for Nirvana
So this thing that had been in my studio for some time.
It had to go
In Dutch cities, in spring around Easter, tightly constructed flower beds appear in public spaces. These are mini Keukenhofjes, just as artificial as the Keukenhof flower show itself.
In response to that, I made my own Keukenhofje from pointers/name tags that you can find in herb gardens-botanical gardens. Just as colourful, just as natural. The signs are waiting for something nameless to come up, as a mockery of the habit of classifying and naming everything around us.
¿loɹʇuoɔ uᴉɐƃǝɹ ǝʍ plnoM ¿sƃuᴉɥʇ ǝƃuɐɹɹɐǝɹ 'ʇɐǝdǝɹ 'ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ ¿ǝɯᴉʇ uᴉ spɹɐʍɹoɟ puɐ spɹɐʍʞɔɐq uɐǝl plnoɔ ǝʍ ɟᴉ ʇɐɥM ¿ɹɐǝuᴉl-uou ǝɹǝʍ ssǝɹƃoɹd puɐ ǝɯᴉʇ ɟᴉ ʇɐɥM ˙ɯnᴉpǝɯ ǝlᴉƃɐɹɟ ɐ sᴉ ǝɯᴉʇ
from the ‘Wackelpudding Series’
HD-video with sound,
01:04 min.
© VG Bild-Kunst 2024
HD-video with sound
00:35 min.
Peter Christenson (b.1979, USA) is a multiform conceptualist who works across media, platforms, and environments. As a social worker and former psychotherapist, Christenson often uses the moniker PSYCHOLOGARTIST to highlight the interdisciplinary, socially-engaged, and interventionist nature of his practice, sometimes classifying artworks with a specific diagnostic code from the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” a widely accepted instrument for psychiatric diagnosis.
‘This photograph was taken during a walk I often take in the summer along a gravel road on an island in northern Quebec. It’s part of a publishing project that will bring together 59 images of power poles photographed along this road. The 59 photographs are almost identical, repetitive or redundant’.
Part 1
I was on a train through Poland. Before I ate my boiled egg, I made a drawing with it.
Balancing on the page of my sketchbook, I circled the egg with the pencil. Moving it, but avoiding letting it fall off the page, I gave the object the greatest possible freedom to move.
A kind of balance between freedom and control. The egg controlled my hand, my hand controlled the egg.
A game. Lines triggered by the round object (and the train) and my reactions to it.
A dialogue.
Part 2
Eventually I completed it into abstract shapes by expanding the lines according to their intensity. Sometimes to make them invisible, sometimes to use them as boundaries.
What has been my work now?
Transformed images of the movements of an egg?
To have a concept and follow it?
To be open to strange ideas?
zur letzten weihnacht
glühten unsere finger
wie nadeln am baum
umarmendes grün
deine augen tief traurig
wie der nächste tag
moos meiner moore
verloren gingen wir und
fanden einander
haiku 5-7-5 IOMSR 03.10.23
Video with sound
01:32 min.
Fraudulent Activities
It is a precipice
of humanity’s destruction
of potential.
There are consequences
of existential risk –
of existential catastrophe
It could be
extinction,
unrecoverable collapse,
or permanent dystopia.