Theory open trilogy / The shirt of san Francesco, St. Lazarus, St. Teresa
EXCERPTS
Mladina, Jurij Krpan, Artistic dirrector of the Kapelica Gallery, January
2003
"The all night installation" La
casa parlante, The shirt of san Francesco" by Barbara Novakovič made
the finest impact upon me. "Talking house" was set at the Museum
of Modern Art Ljubljana. A sublime ambient, producing (constructing) its
poetry with quite simple, everyday elements. The projection of the forest
on the circumference (the limits) of the space, and the floor covered
with opened books made the landscape in which the birds who transmit the
messages, are living. The unexpected scale of the installed elements produced
the impact, which we usually experience when we look into something but
we do not see it, because it is too big, too obvious or too close. The
visitor had to - in order to get the sight of the stroke, sharpen his
senses on the diopter that was evoked by the ambient. Lynch like, I would
say."
Toward a new performativity and processuality
Marina Gržinić
The Speaking House (La casa parlante),
Ljubljana 2002, Barbara Novakovič
Auto-referentiality
The Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana invited us to a 12 hour installation
by Barbara Novakovič with the title The speaking House. In one of the
central exhibition rooms, a thick paper carpet awaited us; the space was
covered with books, hundreds of them lying on the floor, opened at different
pages. On the wall of this room, static images of a forest were projected,
and the space was "occupied" by special trained pigeons perching
on shelves on the walls. These books where speaking, literally - through
the help of ventilators, the books' pages where mingling, or just lightly
vibrating and thus producing a truly morbid spectacle. We could learn
that in our daily life, we are literally receivers of signals and frequencies;
received through our eyes and ears and transmitted to our brains for "digestion".
It was a very spooky feeling to come out from this desert of knowledge,
from this dead suburbia of remnants of the printing industry, a really
tragic spectacle. The only sign of life where the pigeons, once important
carriers of information, today mere tropes of devotion and of animalized
aspects of a certain, although very brief, but obsessive memory. Books:
subjects of knowledge. Books are bearers of knowledge equated with pigeons;
both are used for the transmission of information. What we get here is
an uncertain residual fascination of the interplay between the desert
of books and a certain, definitely, our proper, desertion of books and
knowledge.
Novakovič's project is a collaborative environmental installation provoking
disturbances in the memory and the body. The movement is the result of
the air from the ventilators forcing the books' pages to tremble. It is
choreography within a desert of memory. Instead of reading we are listening!
Here, the motion is important: it is what generates the only true emotion.
As Giuliana Bruno states in her latest book, which charts history of the
spatio-visual arts, focusing on the representation of affect and place,
motion and emotion, with the title Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art,
Architecture, and Film (2002): Motion produces emotion"! For her,
the meaning of emotion is historically associated with moving out, migration,
and transference from one place to another.
This is why the contemporary emotion needs to migrate into other spaces.
In fact, all three plays under consideration here are almost emigrants
within places that were not designed for them, which is why such a move
produces such intense emotions. Emigrants are always compelled to move,
to escape, to translate their physicality into a variety of ways to hide,
to survive.
The part of The Speaking House performed/ "put as a single scene"
in Moderna Galerija is called St.Francis of Assisi's Shirt. Barbara Novakovič's
Speaking Hous has three parts. St. Francis of Assisi's Shirt questions
stigmata - a process I would rather call scarification (after scars left
by God, but also with reference to the process of scarifying skin like
paper; I will return in a moment to this) - memory and the transmission
of knowledge ( the pigeons and the books are bearers of information and
certain knowledge). The second part is called St.Lazarus (presented in
the City Gallery) and dedicated (again) to devotion, but instead of the
scarred face of knowledge, here sacrification has an important role! The
third part has to take place in the very near future.
The story of St.Francis of Assisi's shirt and the question of stigmata
is the question of how to understand that "Frances lived in sin",
and that this sin left a visible, a scarring imprint on his body tissue
surface. Novakovic's installation finally offered us a path of purification/liberation:
the next day, at 7.00 in the morning, we where able to witness the liberated
flight of the pigeons of the gallery, although I still searched for a
deeper connection between the two parts that can take us to an (auto)referential
level. For both St.Francis and St.Lazarus the question of facing a leper
is of crucial importance. Hence Lazzareto is the place where, in the past,
lepers were segregated, and the name of such a place is derives directly
from the encounter with Lazarus and the lepers. St.Frances himself also
received a strong revelation and a devotional act towards God after he
smelled the body of the leper. Both parts come to a synchronicity, therefore,
through an encounter, an encounter with the skin. And moreover, the lepers,
also contemporary ones(from AIDS patients to lepers in Africa and Asia,
to all sort of people with skin diseases). Have skin in layers; skin peels
off like scraps of paper. Skin = paper!, Yes! Both are re-articulated
in Novakovič's play as visual expression that merges pain with total contemplation.
Both parts of Novakovič's Speaking House deal with a frustrating estrangement
of the skin. Seen in particles, being ill, almost burned like paper. The
skin is here the symbolic motor of different expressions. This is why
I used scarification (the process of making small cuts in the skin and
onto paper) to precisely name this inscenation, or better, incineration(!)
process of performativity. St.Francis and St.Lazarus are sinners, and
Novakovič is, too (what a relief!); she shows a painful ambivalence towards
technology and memory in this always endless and obsessive auto-referential
process! There is certain repulsion in all that we see, but the moment
of re-encounter with the gaze can never be one of indifference!
An excerpt from the essay "Toward
a New Performativity and Processuality"
Marina Gržinič lives and works in Ljubljana as researcher at the Institute
of Philosophy of ZRC SAZU (Scientific and research Center of Slovene Academy
of Science and Art)
Maska, performing arts Journal, volume XVIII ,no 2-3(80-81) spr-sum.2003,
www.maska.si
Zarez, performing arts Journal, www.zarez.
