P017 → Border Stories
“Fragile games... Without predesigned trajectories, held together with some flimsy contract of participation and a few papers. What is our desire to participate? To respond to the fragile invitation?
Maybe it is our deeply engrained need to create order out of the chaos. [...]”
Welcome to the conference-machine Border Stories.
This conference-machine is about the stories we tell about borders or rather the stories that construct them. This is a machine for reading boundaries together. This machine is activated by you. Your knowledges, your beliefs, stories, anecdotes and dreams. As an expert of your own boundaries. An expert of border crossing.
Sometimes Border Stories is about classification, sometimes it is about border fences, sometimes it is about magic, sometimes it is about the unbreachable space between us and sometimes it is about war.
The work (conference machine) consists of various small participatory performances all attempting to open space to read a particular border zone. It was the end-presentation concluding my research at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) some parts of the collection of small works were born before or after this point, but form part of the same ‘attempt at a conference’ on borders.
An Excercise in Vulnerability _ performing the limit - an automated-performance about trespassing and the 'too much' the moment before the first kiss
Presented at
Rising Pressure as part of Montignacht, Monty, Antwerp June 2019
u n c e r t a i n m a t t e r as part of Bewogen - GC De Markten, Brussels May 2019
Border Observatory: hide and seek as part of Performatik19 at Kanal Centre-Pompidou March 2019
Border Stories as part of 'Piece Me Back Together (again)' - De Platoo, Brussels 16th - 18th September 2018
Other People’s Ideas - Theatre Development Center, Triskel Arts Center, Cork August 2018
Other People’s Ideas as part of M.A.S.O.M - PAF, France, August 2018
u n c e r t a i n m a t t e r as part of M.A.S.O.M - Molenbeek, Brussels 21st July 2018
War-/- Lace and Vertigo _ theories to unsee a fence - NATO Headquarters/Bruges, November 2017
5+ people, a tarp, acetate sheets and a set of instructions
20-30 minutes
An excursion is a military term to describe a short entry to enemy territory without formal announcement of war. This excursion is an invitation to explore the ways in which spaces and materials can become instructions and how this relates to participation in complex systems. What is the agency of things, participants and also the host.
Can we listen to things in order to decipher their fictions?
And can we remain complicated to each other?
You will visit the Kantcentrum in Brugge and the NATO Headquarters in Evere. I will do my best to host you. You will be largely following instructions, reading, making, observing, walking and looking for gaps. You will then return to a playground for discussion . I will make you dinner.
A sensitive structure resembling a house, two people and some lines to follow. Some lines to cross, some boundaries to establish and maintain. A border observatory: hide & seek is a research-conversation following a set of unruly lines within a horizon machine about love, avian migration patterns, border architecture and the need for a place to hide. The observatory invites two people to navigate and observe the messy edges, breaches and border protocolls of the spaces we construct.
Two people and a structure
Duration: 10mins
Performative installation. A messy cartographic excercise in story-telling and the too much around a southern border section
a text, printed cardboard, glitter, knife, glue gun, match sticks and instructions
Eszter, audience, flying table, chairs, pins, thread
12 minutes
[excerpt - Other People’s Ideas]
"I can see something changing in you when I say ‘love’. This observed affect is what makes words powerful. When I say ‘love’ you soften. My saying ‘love’ and allowing my soul to slip makes me vulnerable and maybe it makes you softer towards me. The word is eating the distance. This is why spells come from the idea of spelling. The putting together of meaningless sounds that together create affect.
‘I love you’.
I am using words and you are understanding them. I like using old words, words that smell of the earth and tears. Words that are deep, wounded, difficult. Words that people have died for.
I think that these words, words like love, war, magic, border and mess reverberate. I am entirely sure that my love is not the same as your love. My war is not your war. My borders are not your borders. Because we tell different stories about these words. Or rather these words enter out stories differently. But deep, wounded, difficult words as they are we all touch them, shape them, define them, re-define, negate, fight, and succumb to them.
I am using words and you are understanding them. Because in order to be together we must constantly negotiate what my love is compared to your love. In order to know if our realities overlap, or if they do not. It’s funny business. It is a time when semiotics can tie your guts into knots or make your heart crack.
Im using the word love because I find it is a good word, it is affective in a way few other words are.
Im using love because I want to make a point about affect. Basically remind you that words hurt. Not because of what they mean, that would make dictionaries remarkably dangerous, but because of what they mean to us in a specific context at a specific time. That words hurt precisely because of our unique, intimate relationship to them. Words hurt when they become part of a story, a narrative.
I am using love to make this point, also because I learnt this point through love. Not the word love. The word was messy but it was thrown at my head in a moment when the word love would have needed definition. Instead of that definition that I needed, I got messy.
I saw him as love, he saw me as messy. I guess it happens.
But messy hurt. And messy got entangled with love, or more precisely with the lack of love. In a way that maybe it shouldn’t have, in a way that got me chasing instructions, borders, wars, the need for complexity and the right for definition across Europe and beyond. Because messy in my story started to mean all those things, because in my story messy became a synonym of magic."
“ You created a rich paradox [...] unveiling the boundary between control and chaos to be flimsy, unimportant. It is a beautiful invitation: to feel the generosity of the invite, as well as the freedom to respond at will. To not have my desire curbed by a defined outcome, but to be free to come to play in the open field, in the unmarked territory, and wildly start to set out landmarks, memories and images for the others to respond to. Or maybe more accurately, to unveil my own territories by bringing them to the playground. These lines of connection the stories and phantasies we share.”
Elke van Campenhout - external visitor
[research, design and texts] Eszter Némethi
[outside eye] Nuno Escudeiro
[dramaturgical support] Nassia Fourtouni
[design collaborator] Luisa Fillitz
[performance coaching] catarina daniela mora jara
[mentors] Sina Seifee, Adva Zakai, Ant Hampton, Heike Langsdorf, Caroline Godard, Veridiana Zurita, Nicholas Galeazzi
This project was developed in the context and with the support of a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Brussels.