Live Art as a Little Wrench in the Works of Everyday Life. A Retrospective Look at Europe’s EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival 2011by Florian Sedmak

RADICAL PAUSE

I I

Artistic Encounters, Out in the Open

Concentrated into one extraordinarily intense day, the EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival’s premiere ignited a veritable artistic fireworks display—performances and interventions staged simultaneously in 11 European cities by about 300 producer/protagonists. Berlin, Bitola, Chisinau, Linz, Liverpool, London, Paris, Prague, Riga, Slubfurt and Stockholm were the venues that hosted the festival’s events.

Radicality is the name of the game at this new international festival—from the content itself to the package it’s delivered in. 60 artists from all over the world have taken leave of art’s conventional comfort zones and ventured out amidst life itself for up-close-and-personal encounters with the pu-blic at large. As far as the art forms are concerned, what we’re dealing with here is the outermost periphery, a domain whose inherent lack of commercial exploitability continues to make it a persona non grata to the art establishment. Live Art subsumes intervention, happening and theater, forms in which protagonists deal personally, immediately, directly, and thereby run risks both numerous and high since they invite active audience participation. Live Art is art with no airbag, safety net or insurance coverage.The EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival took place on 11.11.11—for the most part on the street and off the art world’s beaten track. The festival website www.11moments.org has been the hub of activities where all the manifold productions come together in the form of parallel live streams.

CHISINAU (MD)

Gentle Yet Radical: Hugging,

for exampleOne very special moment on that Friday, November 11, 2011: A woman walking down the streets and across squares of Linz, sometimes purposefully, sometimes searching, hesitantly. Just by looking at her face, you can tell that she often smiles—she exudes friendliness and warmth. In her dark over-coat, orange cap and matching scarf, the impression she makes is what might be called “smartly attired.” Without rhyme or reason apparent to an observer, she occasionally stops—on the street, in supermarkets, in cafés—accosts someone and politely says: “Pardon me, would you please take me into your arms?” The reactions are as diverse as the people to whom the request is addressed:

a white-bearded homeless guy in a park willingly opens his arms; a young woman in dreadlocks complies with a smile; and even the check-out lady at the drugstore gets up off her stool behind the register and leans across the conveyor belt to give the woman a hug. On the other hand, a traffic cop with a yellow day-glo vest over his uniform tunic grudgingly refuses, though may-be that has to do with the video camera in the hands of the fellow escorting the woman who lodged this extraordinary request.

And then came a confluence of Live Art and Mardi Gras: At one end of downtown Linz’s most upscale boulevard, a marching band complete with a squad of majorettes had taken up position to parade through town in step to the 4/4 beat. The musical procession was just about to kick off and the drum major was already calling upon bystanders to clear the way. The woman in search of physical closeness made a beeline for one of the ma-jorettes who, initially nonplussed, recovered and referred her to the drum major. He, in turn, didn’t hesitate long at all; with a fatherly gesture, he enwrapped the female stranger in a hearty embrace. After all, on 11.11.11 it was okay for even the most lock-stepped marching band commander to improvise a bit. The artist behind the performance that most people pre-sumably didn’t even perceive as such and that is minimalistically entitled Into Your Arms was Belgian performer Béatrice Didier. She had begun her series of embraces in search of much-needed consolation after the (auto-biographical) end of an affair of the heart. EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! then provided her with an ideal means of carrying on her work in the area of interpersonal encounter, and masterfully proving just how radical tender-ness can be or how tender a radical moment can feel when the boundary separating strangeness and familiarity is called into question.

Instead of an audience, interactorsDie Fabrikanten, an artist-run, Linz, Austria-based bureau for cultural com-munication, have spent two years on the intellectual, artistic and organiza-tional spade work that went into producing EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! The result is a European festival that really deserves to be called innova-tive, a label devalued of late by inflationary use. There’s a lengthy process of development behind the festival concept as well. It began several years ago, when Die Fabrikanten started experimenting with forms of art and encounter in which the line of demarcation between artists (up here on the stage) and audience members (down there in the seats) is erased to as great an extent as possible.

The group’s endeavors have included an interdisciplinary working sympo-sium in no-man’s-land on the Austrian-Czech border, an open-air, wooden-plank stage set up for 100 days on the market square of a rural village, and the establishment of an analog human network via the temporary exchange of the main table of various highly dissimilar households. It also began with the attempt undertaken in numerous projects to concretely express the ab-stract concept of “Europe” and to put it in plastic terms (at least for itself).

Ritual foot-washingChange of scenery: In Bitola, Macedonia from sunrise to sunset on 11/11, American artist Rob Andrews publicly went about what can at best be described as a highly embarrassing, symbolic act performed once a year in Roman Catho-lic churches: with humility and devotion, washing other people’s feet. Andrews, who has intensively dealt with purification rituals including a three-month stint cleaning a New York gallery during which he went through 400 toothbrushes, chose a market hall in the Balkan city as his venue. The shops were still closed on both side of an aisle already full of people—some leisurely strolling, others hustling rapidly past. Andrews, a powerfully-built, bearded man, knelt before four men, each standing barefoot upon a white hand towel. A piece of white cloth was draped over the head of each one, who was thus made anonymous and faceless. Accompanied by the more or less poorly concealed astonishment of passers-by, the artist knelt on the floor before those participating in his arti-stic action, who increased in number over the course of the day. He went about his self-assigned task with meticulousness and patience. When he was done, he stood up and bowed deeply before the person whose feet he had just was-hed—and whose head covering prevented him from witnessing this act. Yes, he finds his work thoroughly meditative, Andrews has stated elsewhere, and the tranquility of his action actually reminds him of a Zen exercise. Finally, he speaks a few words to the person facing him, who then removes the cloth cove-ring his head. Then the artist turns to the next person, getting his attention with a gentle touch. Andrews then reassumes his servile position and performs the next act of cleansing.

Passions both strange and furtive“The ‘contract’ is to share passionately and listen respectfully,” explains Kateri-na Kokkinos-Kennedy from the Australian group triage live art collective, who staged one of her two Strange Passions cafés in Berlin in conjunction with EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! In this not-your-everyday coffee shop in which “full conversational service takes up to 40 minutes,” the artists have created a safe and inviting environment in which complete strangers (who have made reservations or just drop in unannounced) can meet. The focal point of these encounters is occupied by personal passions—for anything at all and of whate-ver sort. “We hope to cater for a vast range of passions,” Kokkinos-Kennedy said. The twosomes seated at the café’s tables can speak frankly about their very own passions, since they’re complete strangers and communicate under the protection of masks provided by the café proprietors.“We‘re encouraging people not to wait for the miracle – but to maybe trust, com-mit, and create their own intimacy, moment and exchange. They can expect bi-lingual comedy, human warmth, a desire to facilitate their meeting, our interest in them and what they experienced.” The masks facilitate this tremendously, as Kokkinos-Kennedy is well aware from her own experience of overcoming initial shyness, letting her hair down and coming out of her shell. “I have strange pas-sions about climate change but also about pop music and even the subject of facing death. We’d like people to feel able to enter the dialogue regardless of the depth or simple pleasure of their passions.”

Mandy, and a Bevy of Other Beauties

Things got pretty passionate at the EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! production in Liverpool too.

Here Merseyside transgender artist Mandy Romero cordially invited the public to an encounter with

queer & transgender art in Tranny Hotel. The proprietors of Hotel Adelphi spruced up their typically

English hospitality establishment and made several suites, the lobby and the ballroom available as

a playground for transgender artists who, decked out to various degrees of sartorial and cosmetic

eccentricity, checked in for a brief stay. The opening event, Lazlo Pearlman’s radical, participative

show “Dance me... ,” was followed by La John Joseph’s concert and a performance by Mandy Ro-

mero herself. Then drag artist Thom Shaw, in a performance entitled “Drag Mountain,” let audience

members choose his attire for 11/11 as well as the following weekend from among a fabulous

selection of available garments. In “Irma’s Room,” Ane Lan and Karstein Solli each offered a 10-mi-

nute performance for a single guest in their hotel room. The lineup also included Jo Clifford with

four performances of his half-hour show “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven.” On the

subject of Regina Fiz and Miguel Moreira’s one-hour “Ritual Wedding,” Mandy Romero wrote in her

blog mandyfesto.weebly.com: “It was full of deep emotion and strange images. I tasted the chocolate

on Migel’s body—surely a communion, not just a wedding—and the whole ambience of costume and

movement was other-worldly. One of the strangest morning moments in my life.”

A Noble Savage amongst housing project high-risesAnother festival event setting was the Marzahn section of Berlin. Once an urban planning showpi-ece that was the of pride of East Germany’s residential housing construction program which built high-rise apartment buildings to accommodate 100,000 residents here between 1970 and 1980, this neighborhood is today one of the German capital’s problem areas. And this is precisely where German-Austrian Club Real dispatched Tarzahn, The Noble Savage of Marzahn on his rounds as an elegant allusion to the naive-colonialist perception of indigenous peoples then and now. Further-more, Club Real endowed its Tarzahn with a truly enthralling backstory: Tarzahn is the (fictitious) son of (real) GDR star architect Heinz Graffunder, the man who designed not only the Palace of the Republic (high-profile political-cultural facility) but also the housing projects of Marzahn. Born in Angola to a Scottish woman with hard-core communist convictions and raised by chimps under the watchful eye of Jane Goodall, Tarzahn never met his late Dad. Now, he prowls through Marzahn as part of a posthumous encounter with his progenitor’s oeuvre. So much for the prologue.On 11/11, Tarzahn was making his way through post-socialist Marzahn, wearing a bizarre monkey mask with hair down to his hips that were enwrapped in an animal-skin loincloth. Supported by a wooden staff, the wild man repeatedly strikes up conversations with members of the multiethnic populace that inhabits these renovated high-rises, dauntlessly proselytizing man, woman and child with his message to humankind. “You must live in harmony with your environment,” he preaches to kids playing in front of a discount supermarket (and who actually come here to play “because this is where it’s most beautiful”). The youngsters politely return the favor by teaching him to sing the social welfare recipients’ hymn “Abzockerbraut” (Dole-Sponger Queen). Like many other Mar-zahn residents, this crew’s members thereby became chance protagonists and, some of them, via Smartphone, directors of Tarzahn’s live-stream diary documenting his Marzahn parallel universe, which Berlin’s Last Noble Savage screened later that evening in his own high-rise housing project flat.

Cardboard fisherman in The Golden CityThe next EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! venue: a square in front of one of the countless historic buildings in Prague’s Old City. Out of sight but very close by is, first, a chorus of chanting soccer fans and then a sound acoustically better attuned to the cityscape, that of a horse-drawn carria-ge. Lying about on the paving stones rubbed smooth by years of traffic are pieces of cardboard of various shapes and sizes, which the ingeniously off-beat performer Anymous just happens to be working on at the moment. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he goes about assem-bling the cardboard components into a boat that looks like something an elementary school pupil might have drawn. Then, right in the middle of the current of tourists, he gets on board, casts his line with a cardboard rod and begins fishing for the painstakingly cut-out cardboard fish lying about. That’s how Fish Story goes.Cut to dusk: Anymous has changed clothes; he’s now wearing a black bodysuit with a tiny white tail taped to his backside and he has flippers on his feet. In order to figure out what he’s depicting here, it’s helpful to know the title of the performance: Glowworm. The setting in another, no less busy corner of the Old City where a narrow lane empties into a square. The sun has set, but the streetlights provide plenty of illumination. People employed in downtown Prague are going home after work—and making a swerving detour around the black-garbed figure lying inconspicuously on the ground right at the intersection, rolling slowly back and forth like someone trying to perform a headstand. Then the black glowworm rolls around the corner and out onto the square. Shortly the-reafter, it stands up and mounts the cornerstone of the building, maintaining a precarious perch for a while, until it falls back to the ground and resumes its slightly spastic somersaults.

A dance in full view of the powers that beThree small groups of dance enthusiasts assemble in the immediate proximity of government offi-ces and other headquarters of the high & mighty in Berlin. Before the very eyes of power and thus the viewfinders of their omnipresent surveillance cameras, a series of innocent tangos begins—the Tango Panopticon of American choreographer/artist Robert Lawrence swirls and dips amidst EX-CHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! To see to it that security personnel don’t cut in as directors of cho-reography, the dancers transmitted their steps live via Smartphone onto the Web using software developed especially for this tango session. On November 11, the dance could be viewed on site as well as on the festival website 11moments.org.Lawrence, a man as friendly as he is eloquent, has been working with dance as a form of inter-vention since 2007. “These tango dances only seem to be harmless and beautiful,” the initiator explained in an interview with the moderators of the EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! live channel online. “On a deeper level, they’re also highly political. After all, the point isn’t just to halt the flow of everyday life; this is also a matter of reclaiming the public realm.”Lawrence’s choice of the tango was by no means coincidental. Like the Blues and early Jazz, the Tango is an authentic element of the culture of poor immigrants. It originated in Buenos Aires’s multiethnic River Plate neighborhood—originally as the dance of prostitutes and their johns.In this blend of art and activism, Lawrence and local tango dancers intentionally intervene in pub-lic spaces wherever there’s a high concentration of surveillance cameras. And these are precisely what are made visible and understandable by the Guerilla TV live broadcast for observers present online—a fleet-footed allusion to omnipresent control mechanisms and prevailing power relation-ships, an ungainly beast that the tango—at least temporarily—turns into the belle of the ball.

Urban pans with the eye cameraIt’s still November 11th, but the location has shifted to Paris. As in Prague, the sun has already set here, but there’s still much activity in the UNDO REDO Gallery, where people are seated at tables or standing around talking in groups. What they have in common is the memory still fresh in their minds of an unforgettable encounter with the city that French dancer Myriam Lefkowitz afforded them on an Eye Walk. The idea behind the Eye Walk is extremely simple, which is precisely what makes it so powerfully effective. In stark contrast to the torrent of images of contemporary, eve-ryday photomania lived out through digital cameras and the increasingly powerful lenses now built into cell phones, Lefkowitz’s Eye Walk dispenses with the high-tech to put things back into purely human terms. The Eye Walk is the blind return to pure seeing. The eyes become the lenses and the brain is the film that captures exposures of the cityscape. The pictures are shot in intimate one-on-one situations involving one guide—Lefkowitz or one of her fellow dancers—and a guest. The twosome goes out into the urban domain in a state of supremely heightened attention. The guest’s eyes remain shut, and he/she is conducted by the performer. The tour guide selects inte-resting motifs and views, and utters the words “open” and “close”—that’s the extent of the con-versation—to get the guest to behold the selected sight for a fraction of a second. The key to this experience is trust in the tour guide and blind faith in her/his skills. This is conveyed to the guest conducted on the Eye Walk by a sense of gentleness and the guiding dancer’s highly developed sense of physicality and awareness of his/her own body.Now, the day full of dozens of Eye Walks is over. The people living in the surrounding neighborhood were friendly, curious and open. Many of them asked Lefkowitz and her colleagues about the point of these strolls; they opened their doors and quite literally offered insights into their private sphere. The result of the day’s activities is a small book containing impressions and images expressed in words or drawings by the participants themselves, who are still engaged in an animated exchange about what they just experienced.

CHISINAU (MD)

Dining like

Hitler and Stalin

Parallel rows of long tables are arrayed on the stage of the small Kreuzberger Theater. Just like in the Parisian art gallery in which the Eye Walks’ aftereffects are being propagated at that very moment, animated conversations are going on here as well. The cooking has been proceeding since 11 AM. On the hour, there a changing of the gastronomic guard and a new meal is served. By the time the kitchen closes at 11 PM, 11 culinarily eccentric recipes will have been presented for diners’ degusta-tion. The tables decked in white have long since begun to show traces of food being eaten and, above all, cooked. Dirty dishes, silverware, glasses and kitchen implements are lying around; groups of people are seated at the tables. The atmosphere is one of jovial, contented satiety. Here, EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! has been functioning as a swap meet for very special recipes. Exchange Radical

Recipies are what have been ordered by German artist Benjamin Förster-Baldenius’ raumlaborberlin. But you might ask: how can food be radical? “Having no food at all is certainly more radical than coo-king,” the lanky Förster-Baldenius grants. “For our palates, though, there are enough combinations and modes of preparation from other cultures that come across as quite radical indeed.”In this spirit, radical Kreuzberg cooks served fish they had caught in the city’s Spree River and smoked themselves, and tried their hand at Stockfisch (air-cured cod), a traditional dish that has completely vanished from modern cuisine and that actually now exists only as a historical reminiscence.The menu included such droll entries as “Zapata’s Last Will & Testament” and “Consistent Cooking.” The historical background of the gastronomic “Hitler-Stalin Pact” is dead serious: the recipe is based on what protocol demanded for the state dinner to be attended by the two dictators on the occasion of the signing of their treaty (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in Kaliningrad. It confronted the chef with a prodigious challenge: Hitler was a vegetarian, whereas Stalin ate nothing that didn’t consist primarily of animal flesh.

1 + 1 = II = Pause

In addition to those elaborated on above, there was a whole array of other—some utterly unprece-dented—moments of encounter in the midst of everyday life, moments that, due to the simultaneity of the festival’s numerous events transpiring between the Balkans and the Baltic, eluded capture from a central point of view. 11, according to EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS!’s artistic-Kabbalistic method of reckoning, also stands for 1 + 1. For one-and-one. Or for one-to-one. In this sense, the art of encounter can be considered one-to-one art. So, one thing is certain: For those who were present, time briefly stood still, the city morphed and reality shifted. Magically. Radically.

Contact:

DIE FABRIKANTENwww.fabrikanten.atwww.11moments.org

EXCHANGE RADICAL MOMENTS! Live Art Festival was staged in cooperation with aMAZElab / MAST [Museo Arte Sociale e Territoriale] (IT), ELEMENTI – Center for Contemporary Public Arts (MK), KunstRaum Goethestrasse xtd / pro mente Oberösterreich (AT), SLUBFURT (DE), TINA B. – The Prague Contemporary Art Festival (CZ) as well as ASA (DE), BABUSCH (DE), Hebbel am Ufer (DE), KSA:K Center for Contemporary Art Chisinau (MD), Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben (DE), LCCA - Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LV), Contemporary Performance Network (US), homotopia (UK), TTT – Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today (UK) as well as PERFORMER STAMMTISCH (DE), No Budget Performance (SE) and lots and lots of strongly committed artists.