THURSDAY EVENING May 25th Part C
photos: Sarada Rauch in DOMIPORTAPart C: DOMIPORTA
Sarada Rauch spent 4 or 5 days in the smaller gallery
making a grey & pink reversable wall-to-wall "carpet".
We stood on it until Sarada folded/re-folded
her heavy floor covering. We moved from one side
of the gallery to the other as she lifted and folded
(like mom sweeping/vacuuming under your chair)
and we responded to her folding like a slow Red Rover game
until there was bare floorspace to sit/stand upon.
The big folds slowly became smaller folds
and we began to see an origami snail shell
then she crawled into it (the shell was on her back)
and then she left the gallery.
Her simple aktion was clean, sculptural, & aktion-based.
It was "loaded" with meaning(s): the created object, her gestures.
The performance was more like a haiku poem aktion
than a differently-laboured work that comes from
endurance/duration/relational performance.
DOMIPORTA perfectly suited a gallery space
and reflected Sarada's recent transient (no-home) history.
Remembering Sarada describing the displacement/loneliness
she experienced during the alone-time she experienced
as an AUSLAENDER (outsider) in Germany,
I feel both she and Suzanne Caines
are performing from a similar "place" in time.
They both share a performative impulse
originating from an investigation of the domestic without a home
including the territories of immigration/marginalization.
What does home mean if you leave it/lose it/escape it?
Is home where-you-hang-your-hat?
Is it a refuge?
Is it a prison?
Over whiskey with Todd Janes in my hotel room at Dayz Inn,
I vent about the pressure of my domestic life:
MOTHER of 18 yr old girl graduating from High School to university;
DAUGHTER of 82 yr old mother with Alzheimer's;
common-law PARTNER to my best friend of 20+ years;
Squished/squashed to serve/give/support/fix
and be the bottom-line.
I long to get away from the domestic
(like Vida's performance COMPLICATED ESCAPE).
I'd like to navigate and even some day come to terms
with the burden of family history(ies) and politics
(like Naufus's peformance MARIACHI HISTRIONICS)
I want the invisibility of domestic (usually women's) work
to be validated (like Tanya Lukin-Linklater's
performance WOMAN AND WATER) both in our real/daily
(read "economic") world and in the Art World.
Yes, Gorilla Grrrlz, still needed, thanks!
I crave my pressured/fragmented life to have intimacy
and connection with people/community as I feel similarly
desired/needed in the performances DOMNIPORTA and RELOCATION.
VISUALEYEZ is an oasis for me.
An escape from the domestic as we
ironically
pursue what is domestic.
Respectfully yours,
La Dragu (the scribe)
ps: I've just caught up with your posted comments.
Thanks to everyone whose written in!
Write more!
Luv,
md xoxoxoox
posted by admin at 9:16 PM
4 Comments:
Hello, Margaret and company/family.
I have no daily gym regimen to report from here (Toronto), although I did ride my bike to and from the rehearsal for "Liver", a stunning (brave, intelligent, ...) butoh-based performance by Claudia Wittmann that opens here next week. I biked from Cabbagetown to the no longer accurately named "Fashion District" and back, for those who know this city...
Writing from my own "domestic" space -- lonely right now, as my partner has been away for weeks, longer than originally anticipated, and so sharper -- I am envious of the Visualeyez festival oasis, because I have a pretty good idea of what I am missing. But "we", out there (in here), in our faraway domesticities or exiles, are reading, enjoying the vicarious benefit of Margaret's trained eye as she draws out meanings from her extraordinary everyday experience. "We" (for I have the faith of all artists that I am not alone in my thoughts / feelings / experiences) wish we were there, but are glad to at least be partway "here", meeting (or passing like ships?) on the high seas of the internet.
Margaret, it is clear to read that you, too, are engaged in a relational performance -- or series of performances -- in your role as public scribe. (Being the inside outwatcher is no easy task!) And yes, Todd, your remarkable durational intervention as producer is also in evidence, though it's harder for most of us to take in the full beauty of the vista because it requires a multi-yeared eye to confirm the consistency of the terrain, when traces get covered over so quickly.
We really never get quite enough news of friends and colleagues, never quite enough time together -- and this electronic forum reminds me how much we embody the void of it. The lack becomes so present we forget it is even there (like the way a body that is never touched forgets its own deprivation, until it is touched).
Lately I find the myth that is turning me inside out the most is that of the Tower of Babel -- the story of a rupture of unity into a series of fragmented languages (and races). No longer one connected "we", but too many isolated "me"s, all desperately trying to articulate our truths with words that, for all their accuracy, require an impossible amount and subtlety of translation. Always on our own path, with never enough time spent walking it together, at the same time, looking through same eyes.
Maybe I am not alone in feeling this particular story's potency with such uncomfortable freshness (like a new wound). Maybe this is why we are seeing so much relational work being made (not only in Montreal, by the way: there have been lots of artists working this way in Toronto, Vancouver, Regina and elsewhere -- well, if someone wanted to get a good start on tracing it, they might follow the list of artists that have appeared in Visualeyez over the past several years, as Todd has had his finger on this particular pulse for quite a while, now...)
It is nice to engage in some small part of it here on the outkirts of blogville. I am reading (listening) closely, trying to recognize as many words as possible in the hopes of catching a glint of that half-remembered sense of unity.
Scribe on...
xo Paul Couillard (ex officio scribe)
Very best site. Keep working. Will return in the near future.
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