Wednesday 13 May 2009

intimacy


My interest in communication media derives from the fact that they "erase" physical distances and boundaries and enable affectivities that are beyond the sphere of physical proximity. With the Internet and later with the World Wide Web, I would say that this process is amplified or even "exploded".
I am very interested in the spaces, of inter-human relation, that one can "open" within the communicational media. These can be spaces of intimacy, of empathy, of desire, of fantasy, but also of the fascination by the technological, which can have an almost magical dimension. And in these sense, I am not interested in performing on a stage, in its classical assumption, because a stage can be an hierachical space. But I am interested in establishing relations and connections that can subvert hierarchies, which are constructed in a rhizomatic way and crossing transversally a number of question that are important for me, as an artist and as a person.
Some projects of my practice that occur through an online platform, are not concerned with producing an "object" and do not happen in a public sphere, but rather through performative practices that re-use models of encounters, gestures and communication of everyday life. In one level there is a re-examination of the meaning of being together with others, of a brief encounter, of the dynamics of intimacy.
But the performances have a double side: they are always based in a premise that is often deceptive - because the motive is always an excuse or a decoy to engage with someone; but they also intend to be a "true" bonding experience - I intend people to be together with me through sharing knowledge or cultural memory. This encounter is technologically mediated: as I and the participant are not sharing a common physical space. And as all the performative actions are different with each participant, the notion of audience (in its classical sense) is not very operational in this context.
I am interested in thinking and reflecting how can we create and produce intimacy between two (or more) people in a determined context: by this I mean a context located in the art world, which is also located in technologically mediated situation, and which has always some rules (which are being tested if they can be broken...). And also what operative devices can we use to produce such an encounter?

Confession Room

Secrets, confessions, excavations…

Over the past few days, we've had the pleasure of conversing on the topics of performance and perfomativity.

Themes of the confessional, sharing secrets, achieving deepened creative liberty, interpersonal connectivity, and personal excavation, have been constant treads throughout our conversation.

This gave me the idea of creating a little space for confessions to be shared…a place of off-loading, of writing secrets down, casting them outside of oneself like lines of intimacy extending out into the world, of acknowledgment and unearthing, of celebration, ownership, therapeutic community and self-examination.

So here’s an invitation to you. You are cordially invited to join me in this virtual confession room to anonymously explore, off-load, own, celebrate, purge, acknowledge, bring into the light, hold up to the sky, magnify. Please remember this is not about guilt or anything even remotely Catholic. It’s about celebrating secrets and activating latent creative energy! I think many of our secrets contain critical clues to our hearts’ deepest desires. And sharing them can help facilitate a lighter, freer, more creatively liberated way of living.

Click here to visit the Creative Confession Room.