The performative/performatory/performativity is defined as an expression or mode of expressing which not only describes or represents an act in language, but also causes something or sets something in motion.4 A text does not just have a meaning, but it also does something, is itself an enactment. Performance as method starts not from a given reality which precedes a personal experience, but from the world that is being enacted, performed or from the situation in which freely and actively a new world or reality is performed. In the performing or visual arts, a performance is a physical presentation within a seemingly familiar context in which acts occur which may completely surprise the spectator. In such instance, the performance or act refers to generating a world, creating something new. No two performances are identical, in fact they are always unique and they will also be experienced as such because each spectator is unique as well. The performative implies a fluid world in which subjects and objects do not yet exist, have not yet materialized, but in which they are in a state of ongoing change or transformation—one which is unstable and hard to repeat (Salter 2002). The performative makes and realizes the world at the very moment it is called up (by the reader, user, spectator, the audience).
Through my photo works I intend not only to represent a place, but also to generate a world (see Figure 2.2). Basically, a photo invites the observer to look while simultaneously directing his or her gaze. The image itself (the sightlines within the work), the way of showing (the frame, the installation in the space: sightlines on the work) functions as a device which can be operated by the observer, who thus also gives meaning to the work. The interaction or “cross-traffic”—the meeting of making and receiving—takes place where representing and performing, the game of creating, converge and can be experienced by the spectator—at the point where art and space coincide, as in a dialog from which both interlocutors benefit.
Artistic research makes material arguments. Art can create a world by using specific materials. A place is transformed into a new place by using the power of the imagination. Artistic research involves a form of thinking through matter (including the various disciplines, media, and methods), but the material itself may activate the spectator as well.
Figure 2.2 Bewaarplaats / Storage 4 (2012–2015). Duratrans Light Box, frame: aluminium Z-profile with open supporting structure, 126 × 162 × 26 cm.
Artistic sightline: Photo works and place
A transposition occurs from idea to image, or to sound, etc. This transformation is important in the process of realizing my work. I complement and symbolize places; I record and render visible. I select some existing place to which I seek to add a new dimension; I disconnect or disengage a place from its everyday environment, giving it a new context. In making, building, acting, the place is transformed and all its physical elements and atmospheric qualities resonate in the artwork. By fencing-in a place, it becomes isolated from its environment and takes on a symbolic function. From a social-historical perspective I look at and comment on a place and by photographing it I appropriate it, making it visible in its new context. The transformation process determines the expressiveness of the ultimate image. The artistic “I” may refer to the “maker” in various guises: artist, composer, performer, and so on. Artistic research is about that transformation; in fact, the creative process—the work’s materialization—is the embodiment of the research.5
All art essentially seeks to appropriate a place in the transformation process and elevate it, so that it becomes a new, “autonomous” place. In this respect, the process of making a photograph involves an ethnographical process of observation: selecting the right moment, the right time of day and of year, the right day, the moment itself, leaving room for chance, serendipity. This also means knowing a place through and through, appropriating it and trying to grasp its spirit. The places I research are historical, concrete (in the actual world) or imaginary (from my memory). They are all local—if within a larger global context—and many of them are lieux perdus, places of meaning no longer present as such in the real world. Being subject to ongoing changes, these places are marked new layers of construction, temporal and spatial aspects, which are being overwritten all the time. If they did not yet figure as places of meaning, they become so by being photographed—I (re)create them also as maker. My mode of research centers on three dimensions of places in particular: historical, artistic, and autobiographical. They determine the three similarly named sightlines in my work. All these places can be traced in time (the present making contact with both past and future). Moreover, they also have in common that they revealed themselves to me: as given places, they are on my mental map, daily in Amsterdam, staying in Rome, or when I travel. As such I literally run into them as part of everyday activities, when jogging or taking a walk, which automatically involves exploring and repeating the same routes (see Figure 2.3). I have grown familiar with them and made them my own. At one point, they simply will reveal themselves to me. Next, it is up to the spectator to do something with these places. A major element thereby is that also spectators should manage to appropriate the new place by means of the photo: ideally, the power of their imagination should trigger all sorts of associations.
Figure 2.3 Plaats S103 / Place S103 (2009–2015). Duratrans Light Box, frame: pinewood covered with cigar boxes, and sprinkled with essential oils of Cedrus Atlantica, 130 × 166 × 22 cm.
Historical sightlines: Genius loci
To get to the “bottom” of a place (historical, concrete, imaginary), I studied the genius loci, the spirit of place, which in antiquity referred to the protective spirit of some area or location.6 This originally Roman concept emphasized the characteristic nature or atmosphere of a certain location or the impression it left. It involved a metaphorical quality rather than a strictly defined one, a quality which becomes manifest in a suggestive or associative manner. By making a photo of a place I try to activate its spirit again—as a form of intervention in that place. The places to be photographed have a certain, given quality, but there is also a dimension that you can play with or influence by making the photo. In this respect I consider the camera I use as an external eye that enhances the observation, an element which at times becomes visible on the actual photo only.
It is not impossible, however, to catch the genius loci. It is hidden in layers of time and space, but can barely be seen, if at all. At the same time, it may be experienced. The genius loci is bound by place. A place changes because its surroundings or contexts change across time and space. This is not to say, however, that the genius loci is a given, unchangeable. A place’s spirit is determined by all the people who in one way or another ever used that particular place. Every event or occurrence takes place, leaving traces behind which will in part define that place.
Figure 2.4 Bewaarplaats / Storage 2 (2011-2015). Duratrans Light Box, frame: aluminium Z-profile with open supporting structure, 144 × 126 × 26 cm.
In my photoworks, I look for ways to activate that genius loci and to incorporate the locations to be photographed into a new meaningful place. Just as such location becomes isolated from its surroundings (in nearly all cases the image has no sounds, for instance), the photo of that place is literally and figuratively cut from raw reality, liberated from its existing context and thus itself becoming a new place. In the series Bewaarplaats / Storage I tried almost literally to “catch” the genius loci of a contemporary (construction) site in Amsterdam, which through recent digging activities became directly linked to an age-old history (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5). The underground location, part of a new subway line, reveals—much like in a time capsule—how a place in its very core, through excavation of the soil and subsequent construction, is changed and overwritten. The process of digging, the victory over forces of nature, the quest for the lowest point made possible by the construction—all are major beacons for the changing history of a meaningful place which becomes a new one by recording it on a photo. The individual associations this image may subsequently evoke among spe
ctators add a third layer of meaning.
Figure 2.5 Bewaarplaats / Storage 3 (2011–2012). Duratrans Light Box, frame: aluminium Z-profile with open supporting structure, 126 × 162 × 26 cm.
In my photoworks I try to represent that intangibility hidden in processes. But in contradiction to what the use of language suggests, when recording, fixing some moment in a photograph, the genius loci will always escape us. My photos thematize the quality of place in an affective manner. It is about a place’s non-taken-for-grantedness—its sightlines, terrestrial radiation, pits and traces, and so on. It is about “triggering” that specific, not always visible quality of a particular place and therein lies what the photos do/bring about. With my photos I try to appeal to the audience’s affective, empathic and associative powers and to activate the atmospheric quality of a particular place. This sets in motion and actualizes the genius loci.
Sound
Is it possible to grasp sound? Does a genius loci exist of/in sound? Where do we encounter the genius loci of sound, and if we find it, does it reflect the emergence of a new place? If we cannot catch this spirit in an image, can we do so in a sound? Deep down in the Amsterdam underground, at 23 meters below the surface, precisely halfway into a bored tunnel connecting two subway stops, I found the sound of nothing/nothingness, a soft distant noise, like the echo of a cloud. It was ephemeral yet tied to this particular place; it grew more dim when doing two steps forwards or backwards, while it also became increasingly mixed with the sounds of the outside world, the faint noises coming from the future platforms of the metro station. It underscored how changeability and the noises tied to a place come together.
Transformation
The changeability of the genius loci is crucial for my research. The quality of a new place lies in its transformation. The original genius loci which can still be felt changes because the context changes. This merely renders the newly emerged situation, which has incorporated the old one, richer, adding a new layer of meaning to the whole. This is essential to my search for the final place, which for the time being cannot be localized.
In the new places I create as an artist I try to offer spectators possibilities for opening up new layers—of memory, history, the genius loci of the site. The new places are expressions of my historical research and link up historical places with new, incorporated places. They are sites of transition, constantly subject to change, the final stop or destination being unknown. The permanent movement in fact reflects the mystery of the genius loci. Photos ought to be seen, but also felt (Barthes 1980).7 To me, they are sanctuaries, temporary storage places of indefinable residues or relics.
Places of transition are productive because they change all the time. Layers of time and space from divergent historical periods may briefly coincide in a momentary “here and now.” This permanent dynamic suggests a connection with the concept of intertextuality, referring to the notion that every text is built from a mosaic of existing texts. Intertextuality suggests a fluid system, in which each text is in dialogue with other texts, and, more broadly, with the cultural context at large.8 Yet there is more to it. Different, unlike images are connected to each other, reflect on and influence each other. Histories, places, and media enter in a dialogue with each other, generating echoes which resonate in new times and places.
Crossroads on the sightlines: From photo to house, from place to memory
The findings of my exploration of the historical research initially served as foundation of my work, as a solid footing. Next, in the context of my dissertation, it evolved and resulted in a new place, an installation in the shape of a house, based on a classical layout, overwritten by modern means, yet indebted to a long tradition. In my installation Familiehuis/Halte-2 (which initially was going to be built underground in Amsterdam), the three sightlines I discussed (historical, artistic, and autobiographical) converge.
However, the house I wanted to build never left my studio and was prematurely overwritten, as it were, by time and spatial problems. It turned out, in other words, that the underground house could not be realized due to planning problems in the subway line’s construction. The “reality” or physical experience of my underground house vanished before it even materialized. Yet what remains—what always remains—is the imagination, the drawing table of the mind. The impossibility of building a real house actually extended my central concern of performativity: how to show my photoworks in another performative manner? Fellini’s Roma was my great example. Subway builders discover a hole in the wall in the subway shaft of Line B in Rome, which after countless problems were solved and it in fact opened in 1955. Behind it sits a Roman house, however; after the unsuspecting research team descended into the hole bored, they used their large searchlights to reveal the treasures of the Casa Romana. Until one of them (“Michele, Michele, guarda che succede!”) notices that all frescos seem to vanish just like that. Indeed, the freshly discovered house suddenly disappears into nothingness again, as if it never existed. Briefly, the atrium house is unearthed from the dust of 2000 years, but it vanishes forever again right at the moment when it comes into contact with the present-day era. If anything, Fellini’s movie transports us back to the power of the imagination. A new layer of meaning presents itself simply through the power of imaginative creating and showing.
Having lost the opportunity of building a physical place, I turned to “virtual reality” instead. I decided to build the house in different media, serving as model for the new performative way of showing. The spectators were first of all invited to enter the house and they could thereby choose various different approaches: the book (a reflection on the house), the scale model, the 3D-animation, the app or the film: all the media in which this house was represented and the place—or recollection of it—was created). In my installation, material experience and virtual discovery existed side by side as equals, but at the same time they overwrote each other through time and place. Every spectator could have his own experience of the house, thus adding a new layer in (its) history. The house was “performed” in alternative ways by relying on different media. The spectator determined how and to what extent he related to the artwork. Art is a great mediator of course, and it performs its responsibility in this respect through all these various media. Art mediates via all these various media. Accordingly, artistic research is a form of thinking-through-media.
Having to respond to the new situation of not being able to build my installation in the subway shaft, I became more aware of the artist’s twofold task: how to imagine some particular work and how to show it in a relevant/adequate way, so that it earns a place of its own in the audience’s perception. This also pertains to appealing to the different audiences that a work may generate (by means of different manifestations/media).
By deploying media such as film, 3D-animation and app, it became possible to overwrite, so to speak, the “real” underground house in a reversed experience of time. A film was made of what might have been, rather than of what was. Virtual performativity or material experience—both overwrite the temporal and spatial limitations of the installation, the disrupted place becomes a site of memory. In bringing together these various media, it became possible to reach different audiences contributing to the work. If we all have our own, private world of memory, taken together these overwrite each other and become part of a more collective one. Places of meaning never exist as static givens; they take on new meanings by being overwritten, and this involves an ongoing process. In the end it is irrelevant, from an artistic angle, whether or not the house is real at all.9
The eternal and the continuum
Is it possible for us to hold on to what is bound to pass? Can we isolate or “fix” time and space? Do we have the power to touch the ephemeral and retain it, if only momentarily? By “digging” in collective classical history and tapping my personal recollections, I found fertile soil in which my fascination for place, transience, and transition could take root. My photo works involve photos in context wh
ich tell a story about a place. If in my performative house project the house served as accommodation of the photo works, in my current work the Duratrans Light Boxes themselves serve as artistic accommodation, each work having its own individual encasing. As such each box is like a ‘house’ telling its own story, a temporary museum for the image, captured in a photo. It turns my photo works into objects. Historical, current, or imaginary places, all shrouded—“placed”—in a context of their own. The new house operates performatively: it gives visitors a red-carpet welcome by pulling them into the image, sprinkled with scent, climate-control, and sound. The sightlines on the work are enhanced by performative media, mutually influencing each other from the essence of the image in equal measure. The method of artistic research works by thinking-through-media, underpinning the genius loci, no matter how imaginary or ephemeral (see Figure 2.6).
Disciplines may become interdisciplinary and media may become interchangeable, and as such they all contribute to what constitutes our personal motivation. In artistic research I am concerned in particular with thinking-through-media. This involves a process which cannot be analyzed from the outside by others; rather, it can only be transformed, reflected on, played with and felt from within by the maker. Subsequently, the work may find its way to the audience, which should ask what it brings about, rather than passively wondering what it means, as a way to generate active involvement. Artistic research is the trajectory the artwork has covered based on questions, studies and reflections, in order eventually to occupy a new place of its own, which in turn needs to be interrogated. This dynamic involves a continuum, and as such it embodies the very heart of research.
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