QR

Exhibition "Adieu Marie"

Outside

I'm sewing a QR code on the outside of my suit. There will be a big one on the back of my jacket and a small one on the frontside. A QR code is like a barcode, you can scan it and get information. This particular QR code is linked to a website showing images of what is inside my suit. There will be new images every (couple of) day(s). When people see me in my suit they can scan the code with their phone and see at that instant what has been on my mind most recently. I will make sure I will move around in my suit a lot. Not only to be part of the world around me and give an account of how I experience it but also to meet as many people as possible and make them part of the process.

The QR code links to this site: a soft harness

suit thoughts

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. (p. 23-24)

Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dress-maker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside, without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience. (p. 21-22)

From Henry David Thoreau's Walden

the suit and where it took me

since last Tuesday I'm wearing a suit

I wore it on the train, in the optical museum in Jena, in a mild snowstorm, in a cafe,

in another cafe (where I spilled coffee over it), eating diner at a friends’ place, holding a ladder while two people were painting a wall, in my own house, in the supermarket and everywhere inbetween

I will wear it the coming weeks, months, while sewing my thoughts on the inside

and wondering what this is all about

is it a diary? a mindmap? a performance? an egocentric ego-document or can it communicate something more than what is on my mind?

what is the role of inside and outside? how can I use the voyeuristic element?

is the value in my perseverence to wear it?

does the content matter or does it matter there is content?

should i go on a trip again and wear it while walking?

it makes me more attentive to the world but does it makes others more attentive?

While sewing in the train to Jena I sat next to a woman who was shouting the private details of her life in her phone so we could all hear it but nobody took notice of it. Do you have to be secretive to make people interested these days? Silent? On the inside?

I had some nice conversations during the process. And saw a kingfisher in the snow. Only because I am wearing a suit. I'm sure.

growing cucumbers for W.G. Sebald, first try

botanical garden jena

sewing and Sebald

I watched "Patience (after Sebald)" tonight. Katie Mitchel talks about the rip that can happen when you just wander around and "things sort of rip or tear and you see things as they actually are, and then most of the time we just turn away, we sort of sew it up and just move on and don't notice it but Sebald ... he has no mechanism by which he can sew it up and walk away from it - it rips, he sees another reality and he just tips into it ....

the whole world is there

A room like a drawing

A room

I fell in love. Love at first sight, I never believed in it. But there it was. Just around the corner. In Marienstrasse 2.

I stepped inside the room and fell. Bottomless. I am still floating. Haven't touch the floor since. Only that floor. The room's floor. My feet freezing. There's no heating in there and it is cold outside.

I never made a secret of hating my Weimar apartment. It has three small rooms, a small kitchen and a big bathroom. Low ceilings, linoleum on the floor, central heating. I tried to make it comfortable and feel at home in there but I don't.

What is it about this room that makes me feel at home? I am not sure. A friendliness, a softness, a balance. The walls evoke memories but I don't know of what. Of drawings I have seen before. Or maybe I haven't. Maybe I have just been waiting for them. Or have seen them just now, looked away, forgot about them and remembered them when I looked again.

I wonder if this room might look like the inside of my head. In fact I would like it if the inside of my head would look like this room. Traces of past events, shapes and structures. But when I am in this room, who is in my head?

faded

some first thoughts on a small room

Jumped

Today I followed my feet. My guts. My hands. I reached for some invisible stars. Fell. Failed. But laughed. Played. Surprised myself. Embarrassed myself. Walked bare feet into a library wall. Explored some stairs. Put on a pair of different eyes. Moved. Got moved. Was moved. In different ways. Saw how the world can be big and small at the same time. Touched something new. Something old. Began at the wrong end. Ended at the beginning. Jumped.

(after a three day workshop with choreographer, filmmaker & visualnaut Daniel Belton)

The workshop made me think a lot about some first try-outs I did with a dancer & choreologist in Ireland last year.  There is a first sketch of our working process HERE

when I wasn't in Weimar

 more polaroids HERE

A new idea in a new coat

I had an idea. It was based on project I had done last summer. During the Sideways Festival I walked with a group of artists from one end of Belgium to the other end. We did projects on the road and in the festival weekends. I wore the same 3 piece walking suit every day. From the outside it got stained, worn-out, torn. It showed the traces of the trip. I used the inside as my notebook, embroidering thoughts, sketches, other peoples' words in my coat,vest and trousers.
After the festival I decided I would get myself a new suit, wear it for a longer period of time during "normal circumstances". And that is what I'm aiming for now.

I talked about this idea with a number of people and somebody commented that it was a rather shy approach and that I should think about communicating the work more. This made me think and I realized it wasn't the first time I heard this comment. In one of the first exhibitions I did outside the academy I made a work which was the biggest work in the exhibition. Some people didn't see it though because they walked over it without noticing it. I was accused of being a bad artist because I hadn't made sure the audience noticed my work. I returned the accusation by saying that I could just as well call the people not noticing my work a bad audience because they hadn't been observing very well.

I realize it is a fine line. And I know there is a lot of hiding, invisibility, researching inside-outside going on in my work. I like to think about perception, about what we see and what we don't see, challenging the audience to look at the world around them more carefully. I also know that a certain amount of intimacy can create the danger of making the work too private.

Anyway. Here are some pictures of the suit and of some earlier projects that relate to it in some sort of way. And I'll be thinking about how the inside of my new suit will relate to the outside world. I've been doing some research about wearing suits and writing travel diaries in the last decades. More about that later.

Walking along fields

      

It has been a long time since I made my favorite walk. I live on the edge of Weimar and it only takes me 5 minutes to be surrounded by empty fields, stretching out into all directions. I love to let my gaze wander around while my feet move forward, standing still from time to time.
I brought a book along because at the end of my walk, there's my favorite cafe. They have the best coffee in Weimar and serve a decent croissant.
It always takes me about an hour to get there, I guess I could be quicker but there's usually something catching my attention, or a photo has to be taken, or I get lost in a thought and my pace slows down. The fields always intrigue me, their color, the lines, the small things happening. While walking I thought about my plans for this semester. Last summer I embroidered my thoughts in a three-piece walking suit. This semester I want to develop this idea further.

In the Kaffeeladen I opened my book. John Berger, About Looking. I had actually brought it because it was lying around and I still hadn't read it. I quickly discovered it had been the right book for this day. In this book, Berger explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. One of the first essays is called "The Suit and the Photograph". Berger writes about August Sander's well-known photograph of three young peasants on the road going to a dance, as well as some other photos of men in suits. There is a reference to Goethe in the essay which was precisely what I read (in other words) in Henri Bortoft's book "The wholeness of nature. Goethe's way towards a science of conscious participation in nature." yesterday evening before I fell asleep: "There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory." But the biggest surprise of all was the last essay in the book. It is titled "Field" and if I could I would have quoted the whole essay here, but let's stick to some quotes.
"This field affords me considerable pleasure. Why then do I not sometimes walk there - it is quite near my flat - instead of relying on being stopped there by the closed level crossing? It is a question of contingencies overlapping. The events which take place in the field - two birds chasing one another, a cloud crossing the sun and changing the color of the green - acquire a special signficance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin".
He explains how any field, if perceived in a certain way, may offer this experience and then describes the ideal field, the field most likely to generate the experience. Then he goes back to describing some of the events that might happen in the field. And how they relate to the field. "You relate the events which you have seen and are still seeing to the field. It is not only that the field frames them, it also contains them. The existence of the field is the precondition for their occurring in the way that they have done and for the way in which others are sitll occurring. All events exist as definable events by virtue of their relation to other events."
He then explains why he first referred to the field as a space awaiting events and later on as an event in itself. The last line in the essay is the best one.

"The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life."

(John Berger, About looking. Bloomsberry 2009, "Field", p. 199-205)