A Poetry Intervention by Nati Canto

A Poetry Intervention by Nati Canto: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, 2018

For the Misplaced Women? Workshop lead by Tanja Ostojić in Berlin in January 2018, I thought it was interesting to have something feminine to show in my performance and that I could identify with because being someone from Brazil in Berlin and having traveled and lived in other countries, I believe as a woman in my mid-30s I came to the conclusion that life is about learning how to deal with losses and knowing how to size them up and to transform our everyday life no matter where we are.

I decided to recite in the Berlin Overground, U-Bahn line U1 from Kottbusser Tor to Schlesisches Tor, the well-known poem called One Art, written by Elizabeth Bishop in the 1970s. I wanted to do that because reciting a poem in the realm of poem reading evenings or special moments where people would expect to listen to a poem would not give me the response I was looking for. Reciting by heart in public transportation was the chance of challenging people out of their comfort zone and at the same time confusing them on what I actually expected from them since there are many street artists around Berlin who wander with paper coffee cups asking for monetary contributions. Was I another one of them? That was definitely not my case. I just wanted to shake people’s state of mind for a short amount of time and leave.

Nati Canto: A Poetry Intervention (One Art by Elizabeth Bishop), “Misplaced Women?” Workshop, Berlin 2018. Photo documentation: Alice Minervini, Sajan Mani, Jiachen Xu, Evdoxia Stafylaraki.

The poem is precious to me because Elizabeth Bishop lived for years in Brazil with a famous Brazilian architect called Lota de Macedo Soares and she wrote a lot of her poems there. After many years, Bishop decided to go back to the United States, so she left Lota who had never accepted it and ended up committing suicide. 

The poem is written in the first person and it underlines the value of learning from loosing things throughout life. And it starts from very simple and small things such losing door keys and it escalates to losing houses, two rivers, a continent and losing the person you love, at last. This is when Bishop tries to convince herself that it’s not that hard to lose someone, but deep inside she knows it really is.

Nati Canto: A Poetry Intervention (One Art by Elizabeth Bishop), “Misplaced Women?” Workshop, Berlin 2018. Photo documentation: Alice Minervini, Sajan Mani, Jiachen Xu, Evdoxia Stafylaraki.

Text written by: Nati Canto

Edited and first published by Tanja Ostojić, 2018-19 on the Misplaced Women? project blog

Perforative intervention by Nati Canto, duration: approximately 40 minutes.

Video and photo documentation: Alice Minervini, Sajan Mani, Jiachen Xu, Evdoxia Stafylaraki.

Nati Canto: A Poetry Intervention (One Art by Elizabeth Bishop),“Misplaced Women?” Workshop, Berlin 2018. Photo documentation: Alice Minervini, Sajan Mani, Jiachen Xu, Evdoxia Stafylaraki.

______________________

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

…………..

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

…………..

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

…………..

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

…………..

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

………….

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

______________________

Nati Canto: A Poetry Intervention (One Art by Elizabeth Bishop), “Misplaced Women?” Workshop, Berlin 2018. Video-still: Alice Minervini

Nati Canto is Berlin based artist of Brazilian origin. Her work unfolds itself where history and personal space meet, often alternating facts and fiction. Her artistic practice combines heterogeneous materials, from the combination of digital and analog equipment, the use of photography, video performance, and more recently the use of text in order to explore how images assume different meanings depending on the ideologies that shape them.

______________________

Please visit as well other contributions and posts from the same workshops:

Contribution by Mad Kate

Contribution by Rhea Ramjohn

Contribution by Hoang Tran Hieu Hanh

Contribution by Jiachen Xu and Evdoxia Stafylaraki

Mapping around Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz

Contribution by LADY GABY

Contribution by Ola Kozioł

Contribution by Татьяна Bogacheva

Contribution by Katja Vaghi

Public Presentation of the Misplaced Women? Workshop, Berlin, January 2018

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Misplaced Women? performed by Tanja Ostojić, dedicated to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. Sunday October 16, in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario, 7a*11d 2016, Toronto, Canada

Tanja Ostojić

Misplaced Women?

Written by: Michelle Lacombe

When I arrive at Dundas and McCaul Street, a public has already gathered, creating semi circle around a woman who is holding a sign on which “MISPLACED WOMEN?” is hand-written. She is casual and seems to be waiting for something to happen. The public waits with her.

Meanwhile, I scan the area looking for Tanja Ostojić. I have have met her and so I know that she is not the woman holding the sign. I find her sitting in a nearby bus stop. She looks straight ahead, also waiting. She shares her shelter with a shopping cart filled with carefully stacked reusable shopping bags, a medium-sized suitcase and a half-empty bottle of coke. She blends into the site seamlessly and so I try not to call attention to her presence. I take my place in the crowd.

Eventually Ostojić exits the glass cubicle, rolling suitcase behind her, and positions herself between us and “MISPLACED WOMEN?”. She removes her shawl and, rather brusquely, begins to empty her pockets, then her bag, then the bags contained in her bag until all of the contents, reduced to their smallest parts, litter the ground. She then shifts her attention to the suitcase. Clothes, after being inverted and having pockets and seams searched, are thrown onto her back. Anything else is pulled apart and added to the pile on the ground. She is looking for something, thoroughly searching in even the tiniest spaces.

With Eszter Jagica holding the Misplaced Women? sign

 

 

 

The last item she removes is a large black garbage bag and her motions slow down. She explores this object more curiously that the rest, eventually stepping into it, crouching and pulling it over her body. It fits. She then steps into the suitcase. Her body, in the garbage bag, again fits. She pulls the suitcase flap closed. She squirms, reaches out an arm and struggles to close the zipper. An audience member steps in to help. Seemingly concerned, an elderly man hovers around while Ostojić is stuffed in her suitcase, which is now clearly a tomb. I notice her body relax.

 

 

To me, this part of the action, a pause of sorts, is the most evocative, striking and difficult moment in the work. As black plastic gently rustles over Ostojić’s contorted limbs, I think about the people whose bodies are found like this, in suitcases and in garbage bags: Guang Hua liu, Melonie Biddersingh, Lin Jun, Tina Fontaine, and countless others who I am sure exist, but who I either can’t recall or do not know about. Most of these bodies are women, most of these women are Indigenous or racially marginalized. Sadly, what we are being presented with is a horror that is easy to imagine. It is familiar and right in front of us.

Eventually Ostojić emerges, lights a cigarette and smokes it. In solidarity, she has just embodied something and sits upright in the open suitcase to visibly reflect on it. She then slowly returns order to the pile of scattered items.

As Ostojić repacks her things, a woman who has clearly just finished her shopping, arms full and ear buds in, walks over and hands her a fresh plastic bag. This simple public intervention sticks with me and I feel like an asshole when I realize how we must appear to those who do not register this as a performance. Quick to help her get into her tomb, we are now collectively distant as Ostojić works to recover and move on, back to her glass shelter. This woman however, tried to help.

 

Source: http://7a-11d.ca/tanja-ostojic/

Photos: Henry Chan

Göteborg tram station, September 4, 2015.

Missplaced Women? performed by Tanja Ostojic at Göteborg tram station, September 4, 2015. in the frame of the LIVE ACTION 10, performance festival Göteborg.

Photo: Xiao Lu