I am delighted to share with you many amazing new contributions of the London itinerary of the Misplaced Women? workshop hosted by Live Art Development Agency and Dr Elena Marchevska in December 2016. Including videos, drawings, texts, photos and reviews. Please enjoy many active links below.
Please see this short video about the “Misplaced Women?” performance workshop by Tanja Ostojić in London. The 3:50 min long video has been made by Dr Elena Marchevska and produced by LADA. People talking in order of appearance: Tanja Ostojić, Nicholas Harris, Teresa Albor, Dagmara Bilon, Camila Canocchi and (voice over) Elena Marchevska. Drawing by David Caines of the performance by Sophie Cero in the frame of Tanja Ostojic´s “Misplaced Women?” performance workshop in LADA, London, December 2016.Drawing by David Caines of the performance by Dagmara Bilon in the frame of the “Misplaced Women?” performance workshop by Tanja Ostojic in LADA, London, December 2016.
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The following artists, activists and researchers developed their new works or performed some of the “Misplaced Women?” scores in the frame of the Tanja Ostojic’s “Misplaced Women?” London Workshop. I would like to invite you to please check out Participants Contributions in text, photos and videos, that I edited partly in collaboration with Danyel Ferrari and published on the project blog:
LADA was delighted to host a London iteration of Misplaced Women? in December 2016. The Misplaced Women? workshop by Tanja Ostojić took place as part of a LADA residency being undertaken by the artist and researcher Elena Marchevska exploring Live Art practices and methodologies on working with issues of displacement. Tanja Ostojić ’s practice and the ideas at the heart of the Misplaced Women? project are so central to Elena’s thinking, and so vital to current issues, that it was a wonderful and timely opportunity to be able to invite Tanja to London.
Participants for the workshop were selected by an open call for proposals, and we were thrilled with the level of interest in the workshop from such a wide range of artists, activists and thinkers. Over two days the sixteen participants created a new community, and, following excursions into the badlands of East London, inspired a gathering of interested…
Alice Tuppen-Corps unpacked her suitcase on December 14 2016 and created the Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s My Home Performance in Hackney Wick London, in the frame of “Misplaced Women?” performance workshop lead by Tanja Ostojić, hosted by LADA.
Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s My Home, Solo Performance for Film (Private). White Post Lane. 5.30am – 6.30am and Solo Performance for Film (Live Audience) LADA 14th December 2016.
Alice’s research investigates how specific forms of encounter with individual stories and personal objects can act as enabling agents, transforming the emotional, psychological and creative experience of worlds. In this piece, ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat That’s My Home’, the artist took possessions from her own home to include: a portrait of herself aged four years old, an Eiffel Tower gifted to her in Paris by a lover, her broken wedding ring, two lion hats, a whip, a box of matches and a spikey golden hedgehog.
Foremost a filmmaker, (as well as and significantly here a divorcee), Alice experienced the first day of the workshop with Tanja as a ‘watcher’. She absorbed the performances of others whilst waiting for the moment it felt right for her to perform. That moment came in the early hours of the following morning, inspired by the place she encountered as her ‘home for the night’, an artist’s squat in the East End of London.
‘Alice walked in. She was welcomed, perturbed even, by a new world of waiting objects: a guillotine, two dressmaker’s dummies, broken pots, old papers, a crumpled bed. Placing her suitcase on the floor she took off her hat, coat, shoes and she dressed the two dressmaker’s dummies that confronted her. Arranging her portrait amongst the other pictures on the wall she laid out her own vessels, four little dishes and a Van Gogh teddy bear. Alice infiltrated the space through the slow positioning of her objects. She embodied the space as she integrated her objects with those of the absent ‘host’, in this way she re-storyed herself into a new place of belonging. Alice made the squat her home. The two dummies became her ‘animated’ roommates. She re-worked these characters as symbolic of others she had, lost, left, displaced by her leaving her own home and former relationships. Seeing the characters before her, changed and enlivened by her interventions, she saw others and herself more clearly. As the dummies spoke back to with such autobiographical agency, Alice accessed and activated memories that allowed her to reposition herself. She became placed.
Alice Tuppen-Corps Intervention With Portrait
Alice Tuppen-Corps ‘No Portrait’
Alice Tuppen-Corps: Live Performance with Portrait, Photo: Shannon Mulvey
Alice Tuppen-Corps: Live Performance with Hat
Alice documented the process and re-performed the ‘unpacking’ of the suitcase to a live audience at LADA that evening and in dialogue with onscreen photographs of the objects when in-situ at the squat. In the live, audiences were dressed by Alice and given offerings from the case to ‘care for’, one audience member said that ‘she felt a transformative wave flow over her, issuing out from the performer, touching the audience and drawing them into the co-generation of a [third space], simultaneously journeying inward to self, outward towards performer and across to the screen’.
Alice Tuppen-Corps is a practice-based Ph.D. Researcher and Digital Performance Lecturer at De Montfort University. She was trained at Goldsmiths College and The Slade School of Fine Art with a background in Broadcast and Media Production, Higher Education and Arts Psychotherapy. She is a Ph.D. practice-based researcher and artist based in the East Midlands.
She is principally investigating ‘Digital Performance and the Feminine: Transformational Encounters’. In her artistic practice she filmically re-stages individual stories within augmented, networked and tactile environments in order to generate new qualities of reflective space that empower transformation, contemplation and connection. Bracha Ettinger’s concept of ‘Carriance’ is theoretically foreground, allowing ‘the other’ to be ‘within me [him/her] charged’. Alice adopts Ettinger’s concept of ‘Thinking (M) otherwise’ (2006) and performatively facilitates her participants to co-create within matrixial spaces of technological, sculptural, filmic and relational aesthetics. Like a ‘Mobius Strip’, her artworks reciprocally and affectively touch back and within such artistic carriance structures, a hopeful and restorative dance is activated in self and other regardless of sexual or gender identification. www.alicetuppencorps.com
Teresa Albor´s performances, The Yard Theatre, Hackney Wick and Westfield Shopping Mall, Stratford London, December 13 and 14, 2016. in the frame of Tanja Ostojić´s “Misplaced Women?” in LADA
In the frame of Tanja Ostojić´s “Misplaced Women?” workshop hosted by Live Arts Development Agency London and Elena Marchevska, Teresa Albor realised a series of two very strong performances on displacement:
December 13, 2016, The Yard Theatre, Hackney Wick, 2-4pm
December 14, 2016, Westfield Shopping Mall, near Olympic Park, Stratford, 1:45-2pm
On December 16, 2016 she wrote the following related statement:
Packing up the large objects this morning, the bright orange life jacket (child size), the beaded scarf, the soft black little girl’s jacket. The smell— part smoke, part sweat, musty, human. Then the small objects—into the orange envelopes and then the zip lock bag, the bits and pieces of jewelry, including the fragile, fragile necklace, all tangled up, hopelessly tangled up.
I imagine,the women who are preparing to be evacuated from Aleppo this morning. They are packing up what little they can bring. Little girls (perhaps oblivious), teenage girls (dreaming of a future?), mothers (thinking of their children’s needs).
Clio looks good in red so I have bought her a red dress. Libby wants a particular book for her medical studies. I put the red dress in a black box and tie a red ribbon around it. I wrap the book in silver paper.
Someone else, once carefully packed the things I brought to Hackney Wick. All these objects once belonged to others, who took risks, who are hopefully somewhere where they feel safe, where they can dream, love, argue, fall out of love, make plans for the holidays.
The mall is busy. People are trying to find things to give to others. To make them smile, to show somehow—as impossible as it might be—how much they love them.
Please see Teresa Albor´s video of her performance in front of The Yard Theatre, Hackney Wick, London
The necklace is hopelessly tangled. I spend a good hour trying to ease the knots out. First I try to soften the snarl, gently easing the tiny chain into a loose little heap. Then I try to find the ends and see how long a length of chain is possible. But this makes the knot in the middle grow tighter and tighter. My fingers are numb from the cold, with little dents where I have been holding the chain. It seems maddeningly simple. I picture the untangled chain. I picture it hanging around the neck of a woman. She is smiling.
Tosha needs someone to babysit. It’s not easy being a single mother. She says it’s hard for her, now that she has a son, to watch the news, to see woman and children, the bombardment, their desperate flight.
I feel vulnerable sitting on the cement paving stone outside the Omega watch store. Someone else has the power. A man with a vest that says “security”. Calling out names: Amena, Yana, Ola, Liliane, Nour, Kamar, Lamma Dayoub, Qamar, Haya, Zeinah, Aya, Nooda, Ranim, Reem, Asil. Please be safe. What is the worst that can happen to me? What is the best thing that can happen to you?
Footnote: Clio, Libby and Tosha are Teresa´s daughters.
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Things I learned in the workshop:
The advantages of being our own audience: Working together, watching each other, making work for each other to see, acting as a magnet in public spaces to draw others in, acting as a protective shield when there’s some question about our “right” to make work in public. Being open to each other. Allowing everyone to be at a different point in his or her process. Observing each other and learning from each other.
Explaining to security: The art of just describing what is actually happening. “I am looking for something.” “She is wrapping a present.” The power (see above) of being able to focus on an action whilst someone else does the explaining.
Gut feeling + props: The need to allow your gut feeling to direct you, to give you ideas. To have the props but then let the action evolve. But to still be able to edit one’s self, and question one’s ideas, and not to incorporate every single idea. I have so many ideas.
Also, I wanted to say how much this workshop meant to me. This was a new way for me to work with these objects– the second piece, a way to put myself into the work, to make myself a bit vulnerable. It has given me plenty to think about. Once again, thanks to Tanja Ostojic for her warmth, patience, openness– for making us all feel so safe, and so encouraged as artists.
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Teresa Albor is London based performance and visual artist interested in how different groups of people negotiate the world. Her work is research-based and often involves broad collaboration. It can involve video/moving image, performance, installation, publication, community-based workshops, and forms of artist-led curation.
Misplaced Women? Workshop by Tanja Ostojić, 13th—14th December 2016 at LADA London
I have moved house all my life – I’ve lost track of how many homes I’ve lived in but it’s more than 30 – mostly in the UK, but also Germany and Belgium – so I was really drawn to the idea of returning to London (which I left 2 years ago) to be part of the ‘Misplaced Women?’ workshop. And then, in a lovely moment of coincidence that felt like more than that, Tanja decided to open the workshop with a performance in front of the warehouse that used to home ]performance s p a c e[ who – like me, have also escaped London for Folkestone in Kent.
I took in the other performances with interest – the vulnerability that emptying your bag in public created for some was in stark contrast to the way others used the opportunity as a platform to tell a particular story or explore an idea. I was extremely conscious of our collective role as a mobile audience throughout and began to consider how our behaviour as audience members focused our attention away from our surroundings – even in a busy shopping mall or the rather eerie Olympic park. As we assembled and reassembled for each performance, I kept thinking about the ‘everyday’ nature of the root performance – the simple act of emptying and re-packing your bag. It is the kind of thing that could almost go unnoticed in a crowd…. So I began, slowly, hesitantly (because to be honest I am terrified of the idea of performing) and completely unannounced, to remove each unremarkable object from my bag and arrange them carefully on the bench beside me. Occasionally I looked around at the other participants, but no-one registered what I was doing as a performance, which suited me just fine. I repeated the performance four times in total that day – each iteration slightly more exaggerated than the last and capturing the final one on camera whilst everyone ate lunch around me. I catalogued the items in my bag – nothing had been placed there specially for the workshop but I instinctively wove together a story from the random selection of objects which suddenly seemed to have real personal resonance – as if they had been on a journey with me (further than Folkestone Central to Stratford…).
Inside the Info Park and the park in front of the Faculty of Economy we, the crowed of 18 people (including photographers, camera person and coordinators) have done two group performances that consisted of emptying all contents from our bags and pockets and turning each single item inside out. We were taking each item apart, including taking out batteries and cards from our mobile phones and photo-cameras, and the reverse, packing it all back afterwards. This showed to be introspective and communicative setting for us, and for people passing by including refuges and volunteers who gather on near by benches. I believe that one can understand artistic process and experience of migration and exposure “on own skin” only, so to say… In this sense and as most of participants felt during the workshop and have reported after it was an initiation of a particular kind that gave to more experienced ones a strong flash of even (forgotten / traumatic) memories from the past.
Charming Nazer, one of the asylum seekers joined us and presented to us the content of his refuge bag.
It gave me a feeling of deep gratefulness to figure out that bordeaux Robe-di-Kappa wool scarf that was since my school years part of my father’s closet has now found an important place in Nazer´s bag of basics and necessities…
From the highly valuable and extensive participants reports I would in particularly like to share the following excerpts:
1. “My motivation to apply for this workshop was because I had ample opportunities during my life to develop strong friendships with people who found ten self in very unfortunate situation, who had to leave their homes behind during the wars in former Yugoslavia. I´ve been witnessing scenes of verbal and physical violence against refuges by at the first glance ordinary people and that ones who should be in charge of order — police… Participation in the “Missplaced Women?” performance overwhelmed me with feelings of revolt and sadness. The change of perspective, produced by the artist´s intelligent manoeuvre evoked memories of the scenes I witnessed on Bar-Belgrade train a number of years ago. Policemen was checking in a brutal way a women traveling with two of her kids, while baby stuff were flaying all over the corridor. Being involved in the performance “Missplaced Women?” myself, at ones, from an observer I transformed into the victim myself. I felt naked, attacked, exposed to any passing bayer who might get an idea to approach me. I thought at ones about all possible complications in case my documents, bank cards or mobile phone would go missing. All those paper and plastic stuff that approve our communication and consumption and without which as it seems I would not be homo sapiens but rather Alien. A word that could the best describe experience I had in regard to the luggage searchings that I witnessed and the one I performed myself would be “rape”. I think this performance workshop should be an obligatory educational tool for the ones in the position of power. At the end, I stayed with more questions then answers, as our artists claims, is the role of art… “ — Jelena Dinić (Medical worker from Belgrade)
2. …After an experience of volunteering for two weeks in a refugee centre in Belgium, I was surprised by the energy and enthusiasm of some of the refugees I met here in Belgrade. The facts they shared with me in such a brief period of time I find precious. The children’s drawings in Miksalište left the strongest impression on me. They drew their experience of the trip and the struggle they are going through.
…When I removed all of my personal things from my backpack and placed them where everybody could see them, I felt exposed and vulnerable. That came as a surprise to me. I thought the second unpacking at the next location would be easier then the first one, but it was even more difficult. At one moment, I felt very insecure, and quickly returned everything back into the backpack. I think this experience was valuable because I got a chance to see this situation from a different point of view, and to exchange thoughts and attitudes with other participants of the workshop.— Gorana Bačevac (graduate student of sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts Belgrade)
3. “During the workshop I felt compassion, solidarity and the need for more solidarity.
…feeling of the misplaced position of ourselves and other people around us in everyday life that we all try to suppress…
…it is not that hard to imagine the misplaced position of all of us, if the world continues to act this way…
“We all know the history, and It wasn’t that long ago…” — Bojana Radenović (Master student, theory of art and media, University of Arts, Belgrade)
Gorana Bačevac. student of sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade.
Tatjana Beljinac, student, School of Design, Belgrade.
Tamara Bijelić, master student of Theatrology, Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade
Jelena Dinić, medical worker, Belgrade
Irena Đukanović, student of painting, Faculty of Fine Arts Belgrade.
Milica Janković, student, School of Design, Belgrade.
Marija Jevtić, master student, Academy of Arts Novi Sad.
Nadežda Kirćanski, student of sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Belgrade.
Irena Mirković, master student, New Media, Academy of Arts, Novi Sad.
Bojana Radenović, master student, Theory and New Media, University of Arts Belgrade.
Sanja Solunac, feminist, activist and independent artist, Belgrade.
Sunčica Šido, Women Initiative and Goethe Institute, Belgrade.
Production: This workshop has been produced by Remont — independent art association Belgrade, in the frame of “From Diaspora to Diversities” international project. Production co-ordinators: Miroslav Karić and Darka Radosavljević
See as well other two directly related blog entries:
Mis(s)placed Women? (2009-2022) is an ongoing art project by Tanja Ostojić, Berlin based internationally renowned performance and interdisciplinary artist of Yugoslav origin. Mis(s)placed Women?, is a collaborative art project, ongoing since 2009, consisting of performances, performance series, performance art workshops and delegated performances, including contributions by over 170 individuals from six continents. ... Continue reading →
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Misplaced Women? 