Art’s effect on a dead fly.

Site-specific work as part of the Euro-Latin Performance Project in the Freies Museum, Berlin.

At the beginning of one night of performances at the Freies Museum, I noticed a dead fly on one windowsill. At the end of the evening I came back to the same place and to my surprise the dead fly was not there any more. I found it on the floor away from its original location. How could this have happened? I contemplated the next hypothesis: The dead fly came back to life for an instant to die again watching a performance during that evening.

Considering this, I felt responsible for the other dead insects of the room that would witness more performances the next day. Was it something desirable to resurrect for a moment to die again? Was art able of such a thing? I searched for all the dead creatures in that space, a total of 19, and planned on asking these questions to the audience the next evening.

At the beginning of the next performance evening, I distributed all dead insects in zip-log bags among the audience together with a form. I was giving them the responsibility of deciding if the insect should stay in that space or somewhere else, taking in consideration the resurrection hypothesis. After taking action they were asked to return the filled-in form in which they had to explain what they chose to do and why.

 

Process Institute: How to value / The Services’ Jackpot

As part of the Euro-Latin Performance Project, Process Institute organized a lottery of services. To participate each person took a numbered photocopied bill and wrote a service he or she could provide to another person in between 3 sec and 3 min. This service had to take place inside of the first floor of the Freies Museum and according to his or her value system, it should be worth 10 €.

The total jackpot was 210 € in services and the winner was the photographer of the project: Jule Frommelt.

Web of the Euro-Latin Performance Project. Documentation.

Process Institute: How to value / Experimenting Ring S-Bahn 42, Berlin

As part of the Euro-Latin Performance Project, curated by Harm Lux, Process Institute organized a collective 1h performance in 1 wagon of the circular line city train, number S 42. Each participant was given an individual task, some more spectacular, some totally subtle: Reading a financial magazine out loud, checking the advertisement of different supermarkets, doing accounting, trying to sell different objects contained in a tin-box, holding a “how-to value” flag, observe and write notes about the actions, distribute and play with photocopied money… After 1 hour performing (1h is the time the train needs to close the circle) the participants discussed in a cafe about their actions / feelings /peoples’ reactions. We decided to do this in order to keep the process of our improvisational experiments as flexible and open as possible.

 

Process Institute: How to value / Bank der Arbeitswertung und Entlohnung

Process Institute produced “money” during the Actualitas Kunst vor Ort Festival, Braunschweig, Germany 10-2010, and distributed it around the city from a mobile station made with cardboard and a shopping cart that simulated the aesthetics of a bank.

The issues we tried to discuss with passers-by were for example unpaid work, how money and value systems function and influence our relationships and think of alternative ways of giving value to actions that are not considered work.

Actualitas – process institute: how to value – documentation.

Tropical Scapes #1

Tropical Scapes #1, 09-2010.
Enjoyment piece. How to integrate in a tropical landscape… indoors.

Conversations in Silence. Collaborative Project. Part 1.

Conversations in Silence is a collaborative project between 4 alumni of the MFA Public Art of the Bauhaus-University Weimar and 4 artists based in Nairobi with the support of the Goethe Institute of Nairobi, Kenya, and Curated by Sam Hopkins and Potash. I was invited to create a temporary work dealing with memory and national identity in the public space of Nairobi together with a Kenyan artist, Miriam Syowia Kyambi. The other pairs of artists are Deqa Abshir and Dusica Drazic, James Muriuki and Karolina Freino, and Kevin Irungu and Sam Hopkins.

The first part of the project happened in October 2010. We all met with historians, discussed about pre- and post-colonial history of Kenya, visited sites of memory in Nairobi and other towns, analyzed these sites and their real effect, observed the use of public space, spoke about the told and untold history, history makers… All our observations and different stages of our processes were summarized during an artist talk held at the Goethe Institute of Nairobi together with a photo-mind map. The second part of the project will occur in February 2011, finalizing the work and showing the documentation at the Goethe Institute of Nairobi on the 18^th.

Kenya’s uplifting advertisement next to the road in Nairobi. A piece of national identity / object trouvé. Photo by Karolina Freino.

Nyayo Monument at Uhuru Park in Nairobi, where you can pose for a photographer and come days later to get your souvenir.

Off-guard. KW, 1. OG. 6BB.

OFF-GUARD. KW 1.OG, BB6. 5’ 15’’ video piece / performance, 2010

In the summer 2010, I was one of the guards of the Berlin Biennale 6. During one of my shifts, I did a performance dismissing my duty as guard. The act consisted on facing one of the walls of the so called “White Cube” room (1st floor) in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art during 5 min, until my alarm clock rang.

The video piece consists of the documentation of this performance with text showing the compiled thoughts and observations about my condition as a performing guard, the visitors usual behaviour and the visitors turning into performers in this particular space in which there are no other works to look at. This video tries to blur the categorization of the 3 elements one can find in a museum or exhibition space: art, audience and guards.

This work has been supported by With Re-Guards; shown in July 2010 at the exhibition space of the Berlin Biennale Satellite Projects in Dresdenerstr. 14 and in December 2010 – January 2011 at the Fundación Antonio Saura in Cuenca, Spain, as part of the exhibition Ilusión y Realidad, invited by the Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español, Valladolid, Spain.

Process Institute: Freie Klasse Weimar

Freie Klasse Weimar took place in May 2010. It was a self-organized learning platform composed of people on the common quest to exchange, experiment, share, experience and question together. Its primary infrastructures were respect and curiosity. It was open to anyone and everyone and built on the belief that every person has valuable knowledge and questions and that we can all benefit from sharing them publicly.

Documentation of the whole project here: Freie Klasse Weimar

The SART Visits Brighton

The SART visited Brighton in June 2010 invited by the Basement Arts Production.

The SART is a one member institution started by me, seeking collaboration of open minded individuals, who want to discover the new possibilities of action of different spaces and urban elements in the public sphere.

The SART conducts site specific researches in different cities around the World documenting spaces and urban elements that trigger an impulse for an action. On a second stage, it presents these possibilities of action in the form of a performance-lecture at a space that might be artistic, and seeks collaboration and wild imagination form the audience-participants. This process enables a vision of a city being re-discovered with new ways of being in it. The outcome of the different researches will be available in the Internet soon. The SART was born trying to reach an aware audience in an indoor space while speaking about the topics of my site-specific urban research.

Self-massaging wall found in Brighton:

A fence? or a structure for sun-tattoo pattern? Stand against it with no clothes 2 hours long on a sunny day.

Percussion instrument in Brighton’s urban space:

Process Istitute: How to exist

Process Institute: How to Exist? (founding residency, March, April 2010)

As part of the group exhibition curated by Lisa Glauer Pushing the Elastic Cube, at Arttransponder, Berlin.

Web:Arttransponder- Process Institute:How to exist.

Process Institute, who are we?

The Artist Collective Process Institute was founded in April 2010 during a 4-week residency at the project space Art Transponder in Berlin. Since completing the MFA in Public Art at the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany, the 4 members (Zoe Kreye, Canada; Irene Izquierdo, Spain; Carlos Leon-Xjimenez, Peru; Catherine Grau, Germany) came together with the common wish to work collaboratively and the common need of developing their own contexts to situate their artistic research and process-based, participatory public art. Having worked together in various project-based constellations for over 2 years, the first task at hand became to dedicate the one-month residency to a conscious approach of exploring and applying the questions of how and why to collaborate as an artist collective. Process Institute was born:

Process = art as an open, experimental and bottom-up approach to developing and embodying new modes of daily living, social relations and an active engagement within society

Institute = the need to produce new languages, methodologies, contexts and structures to position such approaches and projects

Approach / Philosophy

We have come together as an art collective because we believe in the potentials of collaborative models of societies and we want to actively explore, develop and test these models. We believe in an open exchange and sharing of knowledge to the benefit of a greater creativity. We believe in community and inclusion as a support system to our common struggles. As public artists we engage in contexts and act from and within the public. We create by fostering human engagement. Our process is based in social interaction and can turn out to be radical, subtle, playful, provocative, conversational, occupational, interventional, empowering. We want to demystify the artist and reintroduce art as a creative and political gesture related to everyday life, as a practice integrated into society, and as an accessible act. We consciously choose to work without a fixed space, instead developing work from within given situations, contexts and publics. We like to work with the recyclable resources of a given site/city or view the city itself as a resource.