Booklet: Part 1

Water pulls hard from the sky. I’ve never been under such a curtain of rain. I breathe water. I enter the building of the Kunstakademiet (art academy) in Bergen and, upon presenting my ticket, receive a small booklet of texts. I don’t read it immediately. In fact, I almost forget it, as I always do. Normally I read leaflets only after the show.

This is my first live experience with a piece by Pedro Gomez-Egana. Pedro has challenged me to share my experience of Domain of Things & Other Histories in a text, but other than that, I know very little about it. I haven’t wanted to know anything prior to my actual contact with the piece. Not that the accounts of others could exhaust the experience of it. It is more of a self-imposed attitude; a state of mind that allows me to be as open as possible to what is about to be presented between the four walls of the theatre. What I don’t know, is that by the conclusion of Domain of Things & Other Histories, those four walls, as well as that which happens beyond them, will also constitute part of this theatre.

Entrance

“It’s a problematic elevator,” says the woman at the commands, as though the elevator has a social life. Going up can often be problematic. Along with other spectators, I am taken to the eighth floor, and there we stand, waiting for the piece to begin. (I would return to see the piece twice more, and would therefore experience the eighth floor on three occasions. Once I came early and hung around with the performance team. On another evening, I found some people to talk with. On my final visit, I watched the rain outside.) A door opens and we finally receive the indication to take our places. The public descends a spiral staircase, carefully, as not to tumble down. Some people voice the opinion that the organization has been careless about safety. Someone says: “What happens if there’s a fire, or a bomb? We

couldn’t climb these stairs easily.” It is a problematic stairway. This space is not a neutral space.

Domain of Things & Other Histories belongs to the program of Bergen's dance festival. The public has bought tickets, waited patiently for the right time to sit, and will perhaps head out afterwards to discuss the work over a few drinks. But despite these gestures that validate the work within the institutional field of the performing arts, the spectators are immediately challenged by the conditions of the theatrical space itself. It is not a space where institutional conventions are fully respected, and this fact has a strong impact on the reception of the work. But before I elaborate on this, let’s enter the work itself.

Whilst there

The scenic display has been specifically conceived for the piece. Two rows of chairs for spectators, each facing the other, create a corridor as the central area of action. The chairs are placed on an elevated structure, and we climb a short staircase to reach our seats. At one end of the corridor is a wall of lights. In the other, a television seizes my attention, subtly foreshadowing the experience to come by presenting a spiraling, endless and continuous movement. The spiral is a road, encircling and descending a green hill, animated by the automobiles passing by. The television, suspended on the wall, is part of a living room composed of an armchair, a radio, a lamp, and books strewn on all over the place: on a small table, on the floor, on a small bookcase. The small table lamp next to the TV set illuminates the chair and the artist’s arm. Pedro’s body lies in a metallic mechanism, underneath the structure on which the living room is enacted. He moves and the living room begins moving in front of us.

All the living room is moving, displacing itself slowly in a straight line. It moves like a slow parade, directing our focus throughout the entire forty-minute duration of the piece. The movement of Pedro’s body disposes the environment, originates the movement and organizes the relationships between the objects. The floor of the living room is composed of separate boards, each moving independently to create lags between objects and changes of perspective. The living room distends through space without ever arriving at a point of

disintegration. The object of our attention is changing before our eyes, but a sense of unity is nevertheless preserved. The identity of the space is not disrupted. What makes this continuity possible? What allows for the survival, the persistence of this living room? The pulse of the movement is crucial to this outcome, as is my own perception. My mind creates correlations between the objects and their former selves; I associate them with the images of the initial, ordinary living room that I hold in my memory. I am looking for continuity, inscribing each moment in a history and making the room appear whole.

I also hear the sound of the body displacing the living room. At the beginning of the piece, there was silence, mixed with a kind of static I couldn’t identify. Did it belong to the soundtrack? Perhaps it was not a sound at all, but rather a kind of touch, allowing me a closer intimacy with that which I was seeing. The sounds involve me. I become embedded in a kinesthetic dynamic, part of a generalized legato that correlated much more than sounds.

But nevertheless, the tempo of the piece, the absence of a plot other than the action of the each individual moment, doesn’t allow me to forget myself for a moment. Without the opportunity of sympathetically fusing myself with what is happening on the “stage” (such as what one might experience in the presence of a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk), I am becoming part of the same matter that allows the movement of the objects, part of the same matter that constitutes the environment to which I am also a witness.

The precision in which the composition’s elements are arranged create the sense of continuity I am experiencing. All the senses are summoned. There is a fluid quality to the movement, as though the objects are suddenly impregnated by liquid, or powered by an electric, dynamic centre that does not allow them to stay in any fixed place. There is an ashtray, a glass of water... There is a table lamp, with an articulated arm, next to an armchair. Its bulb, a single incandescent filament, is dim. Not strong enough to illuminate much, it rather announces an electrical presence. Perhaps the static I hear is an expression of this feverish field.

The body catalyzes all movement. It is not enough to say that the body is animating the space, although mechanically this is true. Movement is overtaking the objects and the space, to which the body also belongs. A line of action traverses both body and objects, immaterial and material, and produces the total experience. Everything is impregnated with

There is a radio, some books... Why the living room? Why these books? I try to read their titles. The person next to me smiles. For me, these details are part of the piece. We are too accustomed to keeping a good distance of the stage, even after the many years of avant- garde and post avant-garde focus on spectatorship participation. In Domain of Things & Other Histories, I feel the work necessitates participation. Not that it demands explicit interaction, or summons the spectator to legitimatize the artwork on a level of interpretation by extracting referentiality from its experience. Susan Sontag, at the end of her essay Against Interpretation, pays justice to the kind of participation and availability this work is claiming: “In art, we don’t need a hermeneutic, but an awakening of the senses.” 2

Pedro’s previous pieces come to mind: the falling that disrupts the dinosaur’s body in Swimming Sideways, the magnetic and uneasy flux of the figure moving in a magnetic forest in The Enchanted, the unexpected, but extensively prepared, event of Might Arrives, the circular and transformative movement of Birds Nowhere. In what seems to me a dive into the continuous movement in which form is generated and destroyed, lies one possible answer to the question why the living room? My answer forms another question: how to grasp the fragile event that opens the threshold of creative potential residing at the core of our ordinary life? We know, if not from experience then from myth and literature, that all movement of creation beginnings with a fall. A fall in which I, as a sensitive living being, am implicated.

Nothing is done at random in this composition. It is demanding and calls upon all senses. The sense of continuity that intermingles spectator and event, actual and imaginary spaces and times, is made possible when the performance is done in a precise and accurate way – like a classical musician who needs to have his instrument exquisitely tuned. Everything – light, sound, and most importantly, the continuous movement of the body – needs to agree in order to create this fragile but rewarding unity. Domain of Things & Other Histories has something to do with harmony, the way a synchronous frequency allows us to feel ourselves belonging to the flux in which things happen and transform themselves.

Booklet: Part 2 (Reading)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this text, I didn’t want to know anything about the piece prior to my actual encounter with it. Upon receiving the booklet, I assumed it would contain a short description of the work, as many leaflets given out at performances do. I assumed the booklet would serve only its most prosaic use. Yet, I was wrong. Only after the performance, and after starting to write this text, did I finally read the booklet of Domain of Things & Other Histories and realize that it was part of its experience. The same line of continuity that united the work’s elements had in fact begun before the doors were opened, and continued, at least in my case, long after the doors were closed. Where does the domain of things end? Where does the experience belong?

I remember the day I packed my bags for Bergen. I was in Paris, my mind on the Contemporary Art Fair of Paris (FIAC), as I needed to write about it for a magazine. I was particularly interested in the flux between the art market and the art institutions of the city, so I went to see a performance at Jeu de Paume by Tomo Savic-Gecan, which constituted part of FIAC’s program. Savic-Gecan was in fact presenting two concurrent exhibitions – one at Jeu de Paume and on at Bergen’s Kunstahll – that connected the two institutions. Twin rooms interacted with each other from a distance, as visitors entering the space in Paris influenced the size of the room in Bergen, and vice-versa. The central interest of curator Elena Filipovic, who superficially evoked notions of chaos theory, was the loss of control over an artwork’s totality of experience The performance consisted of serving drinks with ice cubes, nothing more. We were then informed that the ice had been made with water from Bergen.

Through the presence of this water, our bodies became symbolically and physically connected to a distant place – not unlike an act of communion. It is the same water that falls (and falls) in Bergen, the same embodied fluidity of Domain of Things & Other Histories that constantly involves all the domain of things and that, like a spiral, like time, advances and changes while repeating itself. As I experienced it, the opening and closing of the doors of the temporary theatre created within the Bergen Kunstakademiet did not necessarily signal the beginning and the end of the show. The piece resonates in the world, with the world, through my experience, and through the creative analogies it allows me to make in its presence.

Let’s go back to the booklet. It holds three texts written by Pedro Gomez-Egana and Bojana Bauer. They act as continuations of the piece, active traces of the scheduled performance, “fragments of a future history,” as the opportune title of the first text indicates. Within the texts I find a concentrated form of many things I experienced during the performance, such as the idea of a flow of images and sounds – “...you’ll absorb the sound of it without knowing that your body is doing it...” – that correlates our embodied self with the world that is “in front of a chair.” Our chair. The chair in which we are seated, reading the texts. Reading the booklet while seated in my place, waiting for the piece to start, could have had an interesting effect: creating, through the act of reading, the corporeal predisposition to receive the work that was to be presented. The first text starts with the phrase, “You continue still, so deeply sunk in your seat that if you got up the trace of your body would be clearly marked in the fabric.” It situates us immediately in our own physical, temporal, and historical, position. If the distant world is embedded within us – the stars are stars to my regard – it is also from this position whereby the body, the biological living being, remains a zone of reference and perceptive potential. From this position, the larger space of action is possible to grasp, and it becomes possible to act in the outer world. As Yves Klein once said, “the space will be conquered by sensible impregnation, and not by rockets or spacecrafts.” 5

Addendum: Other considerations about space