#8: jokgkgdd ggggjjshh akjsa ajs ajjask
I’m on the terrace of the museum. It’s morning.
Blood is dripping in my underwear; it just came today, at 5:40, five minutes after my friend told me she is having her period.
I is late 40 minutes, I forgot my sunglasses, it makes me squeeze my eyes.
I take an Ibuprofen and a cup of tea. Then I visit the exhibitions on my own.
I discover this picture of Russell Lee: once a year the women in Spanish-American families re-plastered the adobe houses, 1940.
I’m still thinking about the ParallelShow-project and the methodology that Frans just explained to us. Maybe the ParallellShow does the same as the women on this photo: put another layer on the experiences of the museum, using collaborative technics. Enough ‘invisble’ to remain unnoticed for most people but enough ‘visible’ for some people to discover that there is something strange…
Then it is lunch time. There is nothing vegetarian. “That is fish, I don’t want anything with eyes”.
“We will make something, something specially for you”. That’s chicken in my soup!
After the brainstorm lunch we start in the Boltanski exhibition, we enter a dark room full off pendent lights. The lamps are at different distances from the floor. I walk around, touching them softly. I try to make them all move slowly as long as possible. Suddenly she appears, she has black straight hair, the security woman, she folds her arms (two books drop from Elia’s hands). She approaches from the other side. She passes just behind me (pens are falling). She walks around with her arms crossed. I moved the lights with my head, my back, my ear. She stops them. She is watching me, but she is not sure that i’m involved. I walk around in the room and she is following me.
I notice her feet under the textile when I am trying to avoid her. We were playing around.
Like a tangled line, the choreography of movements starts with Pepe and Elia and finishes with the security woman.
Then I pass the Boltansky installation with boxes. At the last part I sit down on the floor. I touch it and I feel how cold it is. My back against the Boltansky piece, thinking about the pictures of Gabriel Cualladó I saw earlier this morning (series of Arco 94′). There it appears: seated figures, leaning against a wall. give my back a small rest, with my arms on my knees. The room is dark, no one saw me.
We arrive at the next exhibition, Lost in the city. Everything is really white in here, clean. At one end of the room Frans is standing close to a building, changing the perception of the scale between the object and his body.
At the other end I focus on photographs of houses by Bernd and Hilla Becher. I look at them and try to understand them, I translate the visual rhythm of the structures and make stretching movements.
I stretch for 8 minutes reading the photography as a musical score. Arms in the air.
People are looking at me. One to them is again the security woman. I feel the movements of the security staff when we pass the doors. We start with sound actions: noises of shoes on the floor, hard coughs and falling books. We try to return to spaces we were before, walk in the wrong direction.
I pretend a severe cough attack at the moment I am thinking we could be exposed. The room is a big space, we have to make a lot of noise. Many coughs: jokgkgdd ggggjjshh akjsa ajs ajjask.
The woman comes really close and asks me if I need something. She brings me water, another security woman offers me a sweet.
(the recording of Nico Parlevliet).
We do many more actions around the museum. No doubt, this was the most wonderful experience visiting an exhibition. The cooperation between us was growing really fast. The spaces continuously determined our actions.
A really pleasure to collaborate in a project like the Parallel Show.
Photo’s: JM, NP, FVL