Interview with Anna Marzona and Monika Branicka of the Associazione Amariana About My 5 Days Durational Performance Sungate Wi
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INTERVIEW WITH ANNA MARZONA AND MONIKA BRANICKA OF THE ASSOCIAZIONE AMARIANA ABOUT MY 5 DAYS DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE SUNGATE WITHIN AND AROUND THE STONE CIRCLE OF RICHARD LONG IN ART PARK MARZONA 13-17. JULY 2020 Anna: You will be performing in a public art park without further announcements. What is your relation to the audience ? And what role plays making a video of the performance? If there was no video would it still be a performance? Yama: performance is a creative investigation and process- whether there is audience or not video or not.The Video has nothing to do with it. I just like to experiment with the material. Taking intervall shots with fixed cameras of this 5 days process. I will edit it at some point to make it a video work. But this is another work. It is not the performance or a documentation of a performance. There is no documentation of a performance. A performance is only what happens in the moment of a performance. It happens on an energetic level mostly. It happens for everybody passing by or not passing by. It happened for the bees and bugs in the grass. It happens for the understanding of the artist itself. Monika: You use symbols of many different cultural and spiritual backgrounds - why? Yama: we live in a globalized world. We get the news from all around the globe. We profit or suffer from global markets. So obviously we also know about the different cultural backgrounds, which is the different spiritual and religious beliefs and symbols that form our perceptions on subconscious and conscious levels. Art as well as religion is using symbols and In the end I believe it is all coming from the same source: our consciousness itself that might be a consciousness beyond the individual as well. Blinding all these different sources out, would look like dogma to me in a globalized world. I was always fascinated to see the similarities in different beliefs that have developed themselves centuries ago on totally different places on this planet. So I believe it is really just one expression with many different voices. When I work in public space and site specific I take in the cultural backgrounds of the place. In an italian village for instance, it made sense for me to work with the very christian symbolism of bread and wine (or flour and wine) in the first act (CREATION AND DESTRUCTION) of the performance, when I created 12 landscapes with it to destroy it again with my own body and crawl around the circle backwards before I started again. Also the sign I made over the five days in total: a sun with 12 beams and a moon inside, is a christian symbol of the apocalypse: it represents the apocalyptic woman who brings the 3 emmanations of light (the sun for radiant light, the moon for reflected light, and the 12 beams for the 12 star signs that represent the possible Durchdringung of tight even from beyond -as the starlight is usually reaching us when the star itself is already gone) Maria-Sophia appears in the apocalypsis to reunite the father, the son and the holy spirit, with the mother, the daughter and the holy soul. This figure has always fascinated me. Actually she appeared already in the old jewish apocalypsis. And there you go: all the religious symbols and stories are interlaced anyhow! For instance all the monotheistic religions grew from the same roots- before they decided to fight each other. Another deep inspiration for me is the tantric mandala...a figure to walk in, like labyrinth, but not to get lost on the contrary: you walk in to find yourself. Emerging from the center.Spreading out and returning to the center with an understanding of how the inner universe mirrors the outer. A figure that is created by the own movement and path and vanishing as the path is vanishing. These different cultural worlds are emerging naturally within my own self. As I grew up in a culture that is more or less coined by christianity- even though I never got baptised by the church- while the central european tibet buddhist gompa opened on the mountain of the village of my family house, where stay now to support my mom, in austria. So I believe the new age ist not just a modernist term for cultural fusion, but a reality. For myself and most other people who are not blinding out certain things because of dogma. Anna: Are you familiar with Richard Long's Opera? It seems quite opposing to your work in many ways, why did you Interact with this work in particular? Yama:shure I am familiar with Richard Long's work. I love it. Otherwise I would not work with it. Why would I work with anything that does not speak to me? When I come to perform in a sculpture park, obviously I investigate the friction between work that is quite momentary and work that is quite lasting. Specially in a performance, that belongs to a cycle of works investigating time. The STONE CIRCLE itself is working with a timespan larger than us, as the stones were there long before they were put into this arrangement. In the end me and the stones and even the whole planet will be gone again. There are other works in the park I like.The work of Carl André for instance, its aesthetic and Idea. But when I say: "I love this work!" I am speaking of something really essential. A substance of a work that is perceivable for me beyond all concepts, philosophies or spiritual backgrounds. All these are very important tools for an artist. The intention plays a major role in artmaking, but after all: if the concepts would really transport anything, nobody needed to make the art. So the substance of an artwork goes way beyond his intentions and concepts. As such, an artwork has a life of its own. And it is an attempt to communicate something beyond words. Communication starts when someone who is perceiving something from an artwork is giving something back, is reacting in some way. This is what I do with my performance. And anyway: everybody who perceives an artwork is leaving something. This is what I find so genius about Richard Long's LINEWALKING performances: we can not help it! Just walking on earth, we leave a trace. We are doing so anyway. We can be aware of it or not this is the only difference. And obviously: the more someone gives of his or her attention and life energy, the more someone takes away also. Someone who is going around in circles for 5 days leaves a more obvious trace, than someone who is doing so for 5 min. I feel very inspired by the LINEWALKING performance and I also feel a great familiarity to this work as my first ever durational performance TIMESIGN consisted of unrolling 200m of fabrics very slowly with my feet, four times to mark a spot as a 400m cross within eternity, when I was 17 years old (some time ago hahaha). This performance has a lot in common with the primal idea of Long´s LINE WALKING: as we pass our time, we leave a mark. So I feel there is a substantial connection. I do not have a better word for feeling a substantial connection than love. And for this it does not matter, that I never met Richard Long, or that I might not interpret his work right. As I said: an artwork has a life of its own and his intentions were just a tool for his creations. In the end the essence and the substance of an artwork speaks for itself. And art should be open for interaction. In general but in particular in public space. This is the life of a substantial artwork. I don't destroy his work, it is not possible anyway, it is too strong and substantial. When I think of the art park Marzona I think of the STONE CIRCLE I just go through the work for 5 days. Also I do not see how my work could be opposing anything, as I am not making any statements. I do not see it as my obligation to make statements as an artist. I am just making investigations. I am asking questions with the full of my being: with my thinking, sensing and feeling and with the space in between. I set up a qlear framework to investigate quite existential and universal questions. How can that be in opposition to anything? I see that the forms of my expression might be very different to Long´s. I see and admire his amazing simplicity and purity of expression. He is surely an artist I can learn of. And my way to learn is: making a performance. And since I was inspired by a tantric mandala as well as Maria- Sophia who appears to reunite father son and holy spirit with mother, daughter and holy soul, it felt right to interact with an artwork of a man that I can love, being a female artist Monika: You might as well call it a ritual or a meditation and you say, it is no audience needed to turn your work into a performance, why do you call it art? Yama: Well, you don't have to call it art. Actually there are many things about this term and the field of art (artscene, art market) that I do not find very appealing.