ACT//,
a collaborative exhibition with: Célio Braga (Brazil, 1965),
Maaike Gottschal (The Netherlands, 1973), Jeannette Jansen (Germany,
1966), Claudia Lisboa (Brazil, 1963) and Remco Veenbrik (The Netherlands,
1971)
.
Potentially, potentially...
The word was still turning in my mind when I woke up this morning
with the uncanny feeling that yesterday played a strange game with
me . I felt strange and mingled, as if I had jumped off a train in
the middle of a western movie with all the before- and after -scnes
erased. I stood up and looked at the wrinkled sheets left behind.
I turned to the mirror: I was still wearing my white birthday dress
but there were some green spots (grass?) on it... it looked like I
had slept in it for a week. There was blue glitter hidden between
my eyelids and some red spots on my neck. Again everything went so
fast. But now the house was silent. The only sound came from the moving
curtains near the open window. Slowly I started to remember..
The articulation of relations between ourself, our body, our clothing
and the situation we have to act in is a point of attention in an
article by Dirk Lauwaert*. About the costumes and actors in a film
by Visconti he writes; "the attire must impede. Visconti forces
the actors there to step across.
.
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Like
stepping over a slithering corpse in a blood puddle. The attire stands
in the way, must stand in the way: she does not carry it easily and
confuses therefore the game. The actor must act against it. The costumes
do not carry the drama immediately, but just through the crack of
its inconvenience." .
Most acts/ actions are not that heroic at all. Nor decisions that
are the outcome of hours and hours of thinking. They were taken somewhere
between waking and sleeping. Between the gaze out of the window and
the lifting of an arm. Sometimes you wake up with the feeling that
some strange forces took over your life. There are things and processes
that seem to be out of our control and therefore 'strange', 'fascinating'
and 'horror' at the same time. It seems that reason is not a thing
on itself but closely connected to our emotions, memories and everyday
functioning. We don't know exactly where we are in the story but we
know we are here. We can step back, take our looking glass, inhale
and incorporate the things that effect us in order to make them operative
again .
*Dirks Lauwaert. De Witte Raaf- 126/ mart-april 2007, Visconti,
Rocco, Simone, Nadia/ La Robe de L'Histoire.
Maaike Gottschal
fashion designer
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