artist statement

I am not a whore in the traditional sense. I want to give everything for free. I want to give everything. I want to give it to you, even if you do not want it. I need to give this to you,
Now. Because it matters.

My work is silent but loud. I want to gently strip away your skin and touch you underneath. I want to insert a needle, or maybe a thorn from a flower.
How do you feel?
Please tell me.
These dances come to existence from a need to speak, to ask, to participate. The form that they take is the form that offers itself for me to find a way in. I am looking for a way in, into your mind, your body. The work is created in our meeting. It does not exist without you.
I make work to understand the world around me, to make sense of what may have none. I dance to map what otherwise is incomprehensible to me. I am attempting to see the world through a poetics of the body, which is to feel and to be felt.
My work asks what is important. What do we care about? What were the choices that brought us here? They are questions I ask of myself, and I try to lie less every time I answer. I go towards discomfort, because it is a mobilizing force. I place naïveté above cynicism: it does not make me look good but it helps me see what is here. I move in a guise of confusion, of embarrassment and not knowing, because the constant reminder of how little I understand forces me to actually learn.


Wednesday, February 3, 2010

brussels

reading "regarding the pain of others" by susan sontag.

thinking about fear, again, thinking about stability, about the illusion of safety in human built environments. on the airplane it is so clear, how small the light dotted cities are in the vastness of the world. and how small the airplane is in the gusts of wind and turbulence that shake it. it is good to know i am small.

thinking about haiti, again. about how good intentions mixed with ignorance can do much harm. how we so much rather act from a place of ignorance, than find out what is really there. reading the news about expedited adoptions from haiti makes me so angry. remembering how the children sent from finland to sweden to be safe from the war suffered from the displacement, and how the trauma of war was doubled by the trauma of being sent away. it became the ruling story of the life of a whole generation, poor children being "saved" by rich, well meaning families who had no idea what was going on.

thinking about falling, and the images of falling.
the dream of the stairwell of one of my childhood apartment buildings falling from under me, leaving just the skeleton of the railings standing in the air, draped with loose debris from the concrete floor that had collapsed. i keep going back to that image, in waking and in dreams. maybe a reason will present itself.

No comments:

Post a Comment