My interest is best described by the notions of participatory experiences, meaningful play, co-authorship, community art and artistic research.
My practice is informed by elements of psychotherapy – especially art and drama therapy, aspects of cultural anthropology, namely experimental ethnography and anthropology of religion, experiential pedagogy and theatre in education.
I create experiences, mostly embodied role-playing games in which participants can experience the identity-defining nature of performativity, reflect upon and potentially renegotiate their identities through performance.
Thus turning the space of the performance into a third space: a place between reality and fiction that reflects on the shared reality of their makers, the participants creating it.
I regard my work as games. They are aimed to be accessible and relatable for everyone. Games that are frameworks, blueprints for embodied play through which narratives can emerge. Games that do not imply competition amongst their players, but co-operation in creating shared realities, stories, worlds, and through their ritualistic nature: relations, communities and the feeling of togetherness. Nevertheless, the act of playing transposes participants into a more child-like state of mind that allows them to revisit and to renegotiate their identity on both personal and social level.
This interest sprung from my filmmaking practice as my focus shifted from the finished film towards the process of rehearsals with actors, the performativity of the way roles are formed during the process within these transitional spaces, that no camera could really capture.
I believe that such experience must be emancipated and made excessive to everyone, without any prerequisite of being a trained actor. I create my work with “untrained” participants in mind, thus I like to build up an arc within them that takes the participants from more mundane, familiar activities and transports them to a more open state of mind that enables them to collectively perform an embodied experience.
I am intrigued by the change of modalities within a piece that allows me as the author to encourage the participants to interact on different levels
– pre-verbal, bodily, verbal –
through which my work can address their different modes of consciousness. I strive to apply auditory and visual signs in an emancipating, “pensive” manner, that instead of leading the participants into a predefined direction, create complex patterns that provide projective surfaces for the participants’ own contents to be expressed. Realising this opens up the liminal space of reflection.
Memories and the act of remembering play a key role in my work.
They take different forms and significance in different pieces, but as an underlying theme memories are always present. At least in the form of inviting participants to remember the way they used to play as children. I embrace the “bricolage” nature of using things at hand, within reach. This act by itself is a call to a more childlike, thus more open-minded way of interaction.
