About the residency :
" Within the artistic research on the Relationship between the I & Reality, hosted by the framework
of a.pass in Antwerp, Iuliana Varodi is continuing her
nomadic artistic journey. She integrates deviation and intuition, approaching
various situations by operating in the area between inside and outside.
Alternating moments of interruptions with intervals for introspection, active
participation with external reflection, she turns around herself and around a
given context, in an attempt to melt the encountered prejudices in subtle,
ironic, yet poetic glues. Bridging a homeless gap between two addresses in
Antwerp, she has spend a week at Z33,
Center for Actual Art and Design in Hasselt, serendipitously invited by bolwerK for a residency in the program
Nepotists opportunists freaks friends
and strangers intersecting in the grey zone. She reached there with no
specific plans. Aiming at understanding the context, she has interacted with both
ongoing exhibitions, leaving designed by
performance personal traces, elements that she has made inside one
exhibition and added within a set of minimal interventions as a new layer in
the other exhibition, as a strategy to
edify her role. Her installation aims at linking the two exhibitions while
at the same time is a self-reference to her performative passing by: I
was here too / On My Way. "
The complete program : http://www.ooooo.be/greyzone/program-3.html
DAILY NOTES
Prelude, nuanced by revisiting uncensored memories
In the train from Antwerp to Hasselt. A girl with a friendly look sitting in front of me. The conductor passes and checks tickets. A thought says, it may be appropriate to send an sms to M to tell her I’ll be reaching there in about an hour. As my mobile got stolen a few weeks ago, I ask the girl in front of me if I could send the sms from her mobile, offering 50 cents in exchange. Implicitly and on the side, this is an opening for interaction with the piece of reality in front of me. She answers in Flemish: Liever niet. Want er zijn mensen die stelen. I tell her that my mobile got stolen a while ago from my pocket in the tram in the city of Antwerp, and as I was now on my way to Hasselt I wanted to let someone know I’ll be there in an about an hour. She kept holding her hands crossed on her bag tidily, on her lap, her legs crossed under the bench. She looked as if she would crawl her entire being around her mobile phone. She said why don’t you ask the conductor, they are here to help people. It would have never crossed my mind. So that people need not help each other among themselves? Luckily there are conductors, controllers and policeman, to help us. What would the world be without them? By tomorrow we might feel more at ease with being stopped and checked by a policeman for safety reasons, than with being stopped by a stranger who needs help to find a street or simply asks the time. I wanted to tell her I was doing a research on Belgian hospitality, as a half joke, but estimating she won’t taste that kind of humour, I decided to take it easy. I asked if she was a student. Yes she said. In Antwerp? No. Silence. In Hasslet? No. Silence. Somewhere else? Yes. And what do you study? Sociology, she said. And how do you like it? It’s difficult. But we haven’t really started yet, she said in Flemish, we are now doing communication. Silence. I found it difficult to understand her, due to her dialect and me not being used to it; when I asked something in English she slowly shook her head left right with a crooked smile, as if she wanted to say she didn’t understand and didn’t even wanted. It makes me wonder whether one of the most holly Flemish customs for young girls might be “you simply don’t talk to a stranger”. The girl got off. We made our goodbyes. Silence. Notes. At some point, the girl sitting on the bench parallel with me on the other side, stands up and asks “do you mind keeping an eye on my stuff?” and without doubting I’d say yes, she walks away perhaps heading to the toilet. Refreshing. Trusting a stranger is a personal choice, not a cultural or social habit. The first girl with friendly looks missed a case she could had taken into her sociology studies. Both girls out of the train and me still on the journey, I observe the memory of the first encounter with a successful Dutch dramaturge, whom I met for a test mentoring on my writings. With ten minutes delay and a charming smile, his gracefully apologising gestures and the cappuccino are meant to melt the air in a flexible teaching ambiance, something experienced masters know how to create. Almost. So you come from Romania? How is it to live there?!? A good friend of mine who lives there told me it’s awful, because everybody steals in Romania. It must be difficult to live there, no? Actually, I left Romania about fifteen years ago, I tell him, and I don’t remember to be stolen of anything before. Silence. I did had an unbelievable experience with stealing about five years ago; I was saving money with a Dutch bank; at least it is what I was told I was doing, until, after four years of what was called saving, I got a letter from that bank telling me that all that money was gone, as it was invested in actions that kept going down in value. The Dutch Consumers Syndicate is since then still suiting that bank in various courts, but who can tell who owes who, and if justice is still at stake in nowadays courts? Okay, you made your point, the famous dramaturge said. I was rather sad than happy, as I had no intention to make a point about who’s the greatest thief on the planet, and my only reason to meet him was to get some advanced feed back on my writings. Memory switch. I remember short ago, someone in a teaching position saying “stealing is good”, during a reading session; later on, a colleague inserting a book of a visiting scholar in her back pack. The visiting scholar noticed and claimed his book just in time. The same colleague, passing by a fridge in the school building, opening the fridge as if in her own kitchen, casually taking a yoghurt from it and starting to eat it on the way. Who’s yoghurt it was doesn’t really matter, as property is an issue only when the concerned ‘owner’ is aware of the shift happening in her / his domain. A week later I was going to meet another mentor, for voice training. On my way to his place, in the tram, my mobile phone got stolen from my pocket. Would you think I wanted to make a point here?
Z33 Hasselt unexpected highly opportune residency arrival
Day One. Keys. Room. Nothing. Map.
I had an address,
then I had none. I will soon have another one, actually I already have it, on a
contract that hasn't reach me yet. Part of my stuff is stored at the new
address in ten boxes, part is at the old address in a box - a suitcase and a
bag - and another small bag is at the place of W, who kindly hosted me
yesterday night as I stopped a day in Antwerp, on my way from north of France
to Hasselt today. Recognisable, R would say.
The residency
room is just fine: a bed, a cupboard, a table and enough place filled with free
space. The shower is on the other side of the building. The exhibitions invite
to interaction (look at this, http://www.z33.be/en/projects/designbyperformance/more and then see this video on the Candle making Machine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GpEgaAmETs&feature=player_embedded by Studio Glithero)
Think first. Ah but I did it already. Candle juice on my fingers: one layer, two layers, three, four or maybe five. Out in the garden, stretching fingers to make the dry wax crack and fall down. It cracks and falls down in five stages. Kitchen. Coffee. Laptop. No plans yet.
Z33 Hasselt. Last day. Chocolate eggs in the kitchen
Day Two. Long shower. Laundry. Blandness.
To take a
shower I must walk through the garden and enter the building from the other
side. The water is warm and I overindulge. A good shower is just as soothing as
a good sleep or a good swim. I miss swimming and waves and burning sand and
lazy breeze and fresh mangoes. Food from the fridge is aggressive for the stomach.
Body temperature is what the body likes most. Do you easily get offended? Imagine a cloud asking, do you
easily get wet when it rains? A cloud won’t ask. They may not speak and if they
did, they may be more aware of what they do, of the signals they send out. And
responsible. We humans down here came up with umbrellas and indifference; and irony
when the latter fails its message. The two coffees make me feel like dynamite. One
can train to pay less attention to the way food influences the functioning of the
body and accept over activity as the natural state of the post-modern man. But
take coffee out of your diet and see what happens in a week or two. Observe the
way muscles, joints, jaws, thinking get ‘altered’ or maybe, restored. Sneezing
five times, nose running, a need to puke. I just did, neatly. Water. Water.
Water. The internet connection is more down that up. Connectivity generally
feels very down. In perfect harmony with my needs today. Time to find a laundry
and some food.
I like the
way this building feels today. Like the last residency in North of France, at
early six in the morning when most of her temporary inhabitants are still
asleep. One can sense the building itself like a living organism, its sounds,
smells and colours not being colonised by the bold presence of contemporary
overconfident (or loud, insecure) professionals. On a rainy Easter weekend,
there are almost no visitors for the exhibitions and even when there are some,
from the room I occupy on the corner opposite to the main gallery across the
yard, I don’t hear nor see any trace of them. It adds something monastic to the
quality of the day, a flavour I appreciate, for reasons beyond both my Cartesian
and sensorial argumentative discourses. Decorated by the rain murmuring on the
seal, the birds on the other side of the window facing the garden, soaked in
the mild afternoon light and the bell of some nearby church announcing the passing
of time at intervals, time itself seem to be urging one to follow or to invent
new, radical rites, to stick to discipline, to resume to patience and faith. Or
to arrogance, depending on ones inner affinities and taste.
If all man are able to discriminate
between different flavours, the blandness of the “Mean” or the Tao/Dao is what
is most difficult to appreciate. It is precisely this that lends itself to
infinite appreciation. (…) Blandness: that phase when different flavours no
longer stand in opposition with each other but, rather, abide within plenitude. - François Jullien,
In Praise of Blandness
Z33. Hasselt. Easter. Walk. Kebab with mayonnaise
Day three. Easter. Sunday. Kebab and fries with mayonnaise.
It took me
quite a while this morning to go for a shower. The weather is playing a joke, I
thought; every time the sun seemed to take over the rainy clouds, by the time I
got ready to get out, it showered again. There was an allusive link between the
rhythm of the weather and that of the wireless connection. I like to use
slogans here and there. It challenges the fixed images they promote when you
put them in an inappropriate context. I won’t do it now.
I remember
ten years ago, Easter Sunday, still sleeping, when the telephone rang. (I had set
my stereo to wake me up with The Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning. I am
playing it now on youtube, for the first time since then. I never looked up the
lyrics. I still won’t). My mum. We have bad news, but please don’t get scared.
(Dad died? My brother had an accident? Thunder questions through the mind).
I’ll pass you dad. Nelu has died. No, I can’t believe. (Of course I did. Suicide?)
I ran to find a colleague who used to live two streets further away, ask him to
tell at work why I’m not there tomorrow. I remember his hug. How was I able to pack?
Few hours later in the airport taking the first flight to Bucharest. Or was it
Budapest? And how did I got home from there, still 500 km? Lost fragments of
the trip. Then the funerary. Not the place for that here. Yes but this is my Easter. One weird detail about it
is that on that year, Easter and my mothers birthday coincided, something that was
happening for the first time since I remember Easters. I chose to ignore
Easters ever since.
This year is
a fine Easter. I am hosted in a building that used to be a beguinage - home of
a Dutch lay sisterhood in the Roman Catholic Church - for about three centuries.
Since seven decades it became home to education, cultural institutions, and
finally to contemporary art and design. The old hospital of the city became the
new fashion museum. The city has a Jenever museum as well, Hasselt being the Jenever place of Belgium. These
things I found out from Google and from J, who kindly answered my post on a hospitality
website, and came to meet me and show me around. He says the city politicians
decided to have Hasselt profiled on shopping and events. At 6 pm J had to go
for dinner at his parents place. I entered a fast food shop and got a kebab
with French Fries and mayonnaise, something ‘special’ for a special Easter, I
told myself. And it is quite special as I hardly ever go for that kind of food.
Hasselt also has a Japanese garden and wears the title “Capital of Good Taste”.
It also has four twin cities, from respectively Japan, Germany, The Netherlands
and US. And the
loveliest church bells I've heard so far. Carnival
would have maybe been a better occasion for a stranger to get to know some of
the Christian customs in town. As Virga Jesse perhaps will be, in 131 days from
now. Or am I wrong to look for a link between these celebrations and local
Christian customs? No one here to ask.
If my parents
and my (few left, if any) Romanian friends would know how I spend Easter today,
they would compulsively urge me to rush home, enjoy their lamb meals, wines, pastry,
painted eggs, lemonades, cakes and family stories. An option I had in mind few
weeks ago, but didn’t choose for. Why,
you would ask. Now, try to imagine. I don’t know. What I do know, is that if Easter would still happen to happen
the way it used to do when I was about six years old, I would have loved to be
there. To hang around in my granny’s courtyard and garden with cousins, uncles
and aunts, talking about this years’ roses, kitties, chicken, goats, pigs and
cows, pass by the neighbours girls next house, make up, listen to the radio,
sit on the bench in front of their gate, facing the old, dusty, stony road, watching
the noisy ducks and gooses on the green bordering the road, answering the slow
greetings of old people passing by (and knowing they took time to guess from my
features who’s grand daughter I was), eventually even go to see my
grand-grandmother on the backstreet of the village, across the valley, who by
now would be around 120 years old (she died about 20 years ago), and, without
knowing, seemingly performing in a self fulfilled prophecy scene of someone’s
hundred years of solitude. Whose prophecy and whose solitude?
The heating in
the room went off few hours ago and the chill night is pointing at the blanket
on the bed, and the book laying on it. I actually didn’t wanted to write a line
today. Nor work for a second.
Philosophy is never about
dialogue, even less about “communication”; far from being a harmonious
discussion aiming at rational consensus, philosophy is more akin to a
violent encounter between heterogeneous forces that might open up the
possibility of thinking the New". - Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, What is Philosophy? (Not
My Motto)
Z33 Hasselt. Still in the grey zone
Day four. Monday. Wax fingers. Beer and links.
I woke up
later than I wished I did today. I forgot all my cables at W’s place in Antwerp,
so my mobile phone (anyhow only operating as an alarm) is out of order. My body
follows it’s own night dreams and rhythms. No details about the morning, as nothing
really happened. Grey in its full plenitude. The day is dry and sunny and a
second person has suggested the Japanese garden, so there I go. First a proper
lunch in the café that J introduced me to yesterday: broccoli pure with salad
and a far too large pot of meat with dark souse, tasty but still keeping my
stomach busy, ten hours later. Describing the garden would require far too many,
too specific words and nuances. Thinking got instantly melted in a mesmerizing mix
of sensations that the garden bestows on whoever walks through it. The one
feeling I’d like to mention is the one that invaded me when inserting my nose
in the territory of one of the white bloomed cherry tree, a travel back in time
in the age of my grandmother’s village, again, the euphoric lost in sensation
trip that one experiences when allowing that smell to take over the imagery of
the mind. Whatever I’d add to its description, it would only spoil the authenticity
of that moment. Find a cherry tree and stick your nose into it, it’s the only
thing I can say, apologising for the imperative way of putting it.
Back here I
got an email from J who is available for a drink. I write an email to a Flemish
writer asking him to meet me. I tell J I’m ready for a walk and a drink. I
propose him to pass by for an interview, an improvised talk on the relationship
of the I with Reality, as he would perceive it form his perspective of land
architect, never tired traveller and explorer. We get lost in talks about
India, yoga, eastern and western ways and systems of teaching and thinking. I
show him the white wax fingers I made in one of the current exhibitions and
placed in the other one, and tell him I was going to name my intervention “I
was here”. We keep talking, mainly J. He then mentions he got hungry. We decide
go out to find a snack or a soup. Quitting the building, walking through the
courtyard, struggling with the lock of the big gate. We walk to the market
place to get some cash from a bank, then end up in the same café as yesterday.
J wanted to put me in touch with a friend of him who teaches art but the man
happens to be in France, helping to restore a beautiful property in Normandy.
We talk about morisena, and notice
that some of the people we know, are all on a journey of finding or setting up
a sustainable, holistic place for them to live, learn, share and work, in the
way I tried and failed three years back in Transylvania. The soup was tasty, just
a tiny bit too much smoked salmon in it, or too salty, and the beer afterwards
flavoured, a bit sweet and brain-melting. It’s 1.23 am and I wanted to add a quote
that would fit the process but the only thing that comes to my mind is “where
will I lay my head tomorrow night?” which it’s not bland enough, nor grey and
not a quote of anyone I remember either. This has nothing to do with my artist
methodology or research strategies, nor with nomadism or any other –ism as an ideology I chose to promote or
follow, it’s nothing but a naked fact of life.
Z33 Hasselt. Intervention.White traces
Day five. Sun. New guest. Interventions. Sun.
Hot, liquid, viscous. Cold, solid, soft. Same place, same technique, five new three dimensional fingerprints. White on white. White on wood. White next to green and white. I may have a story to tell you. “I may have a story to tell you”. I was here too. In residence. Free hand. Free materials. In between too many official addresses, in between several imaginary homes. A stranger in another city. A stranger on a fake monastic retreat. Contaminating the hosting exhibition with the other one across the yard. Invisible glue. Connecting what you will decide to connect with what is here already. Going by, leaving traces. Anonymity undone. A name card somewhere in the shadow zone of the grey zone. A zone still to be still defined. A name card to be found later. A later that is named on a label. A label to be named later, by another.
Z33 Hasselt. Last day. Chocolate eggs in the kitchen
Day six. Label. Announcement. Departure.
I stick a label on the wall above the candle I used to glue the fingerprints, on which I wrote:
I was here too / On my way (2010) Intervention / Installation
Interventions, traces / wax, label, name card Iuliana Varodi
|
Marking a transitory presence and participation in the exhibition. I asked the label from one of the curators of Z33, revealing my past day interventions to her. She has noticed the wax fingers the day before. On the small table with the artists leaflets at the entrance of the exhibition halls, I add my name card, I stick it o the table. Later I remove it and place it back, without glue. I invite some of the artists and curators to visit the exhibition with me, and I capture their reactions on the traces I added. Packing now, leaving in a few hours. M, who has invited me for the residency, will be back here tomorrow.
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