I worked on making a performative object based on my visit to Calais with the clothes and objects I have collected there.
The concept is ‘how to make my visit to Calais a scenographical experience for others’ in order to create an embodied experience for the spectator.
My interest lies within the paradox of both worlds I am a part of: the refugee problematics & reality and the Instagram filter & picture perfect which surrounds me on a day to day basis. I want to create tension between the installation & the spectator by combining these two worlds. The spectator will become aware of his/ her own position relative to the refugee problematics and our daily surroundings. The embodied experience is created by switching between both worlds and becoming a part of them.
The steps I took in this performative research:
1: a spatial design reflecting Calais creating a clothesline
Questions: How is this spatial? How is this an embodied experience?
2: The Instagram world: finding ways to present the value of clothes and its historic value within them by searching for inspiration at Catwalk (Rijskmuseum) and X bank Amsterdam (conceptstore)
Questions: how to create more than just a fashionable way of presenting the clothes and objects? How will it become ‘alive’?
3: thinking of a way of presenting the clothes in a spatial design which resembles both worlds by making a maquette of an installation that turns like a carrousel
Questions: How to make it less dramatic and ‘heavy’ to create more neutral ground? What does the turning of the object add to the work/ concept?
5: building up the installation
Questions: How to incorporate the feeling of both worlds by the use of light, sound and video to make it more performative thus more of an embodied experience? How to create tension?
6: creating a video where both worlds collide
7: incorporating lights & sound
The performative installation was shown & tested on the 15th & 16th of june 2017 from 10.00- 20.00 in the Academy Theatre at Janskerkhof 18 Utrecht
