Interview with Francesco Kiais
Photo: Heidi Freymann
ATHENS, 31st August 2017
Q: Why / when / how did you start to work with performance, what is your background, how did you arrive at doing performance?
I come from painting. I have the background of a visual artist, and in fact I keep the fundamental elements of this artistic language as a matter of cultural identity, and because I need roots to create my own language. These roots are deep and they cross ages and cultures.
Already during my studies, in the '80s, I began to conceive the work of art like a fresco, which is a kind of technique traditionally used in public spaces like squares, temples, and institutional buildings, as a means of communication with the people of a community. So I started to work with installations, as a possibility to intervene in the public (common) space.
When I moved from Venice to Berlin, in the early '90s, a historical change was taking place. The Berlin Wall had fallen leaving an immense wound open in the centre of Europe, revealing a kind of no-man's land; a territory of negotiation between the recent historical past and the near future, and a fertile ground for me to find “my” present and participate in a new birth.
At that time I was working on the disappearance of the work of art itself, realizing ephemeral installations and objects which were existing only during the exhibition’s time, and later, only in the memory of those who had experienced them.
The moment of transition to performance art, and the use of myself as a public work of art was a natural formal evolution of my artistic work. It happened in a moment of reflection, in a period in which I was experimenting with video, without exposing my works, between 2000 and 2003, at the beginning of the second Gulf War (the so-called "War on Terror").
As a European I interpreted the choice of war as a sign of the incapacity of my civilization to answer to the real problems of the historical moment and I felt it was necessary to confront the reasons for this incapacity. I see it as an exercise of citizenship rather than a political act.
In that period, I started doing performances for the video camera and writing texts whose concepts were discussed in the public lectures I held, such as “Body and citizenship” (*1), “We are the natives” (*2), and “About love” (3*).
I think performance art, in its very initial necessity is a result of a moment of crisis, a reaction to the failure of traditional forms of expression in the interpretation/elaboration of reality. I think the artists of my generation are called on to embody the fall of a frail and controversial (Eurocentric) cultural hegemony, and are called on to find a position in the new globalised (and multi-centric) cultural landscape. This is why I started working with Performance Art.
(*1) European University of Cyprus. First Cyprus International Performance Art Festival, Nicosia 2013.
(*2) "We are the natives", Masterclass. Platformance educational program. State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki 2016.
(*3) Venice International Performance Art Week, 2014. Athens Biennale, 2016.
Q: What is your process like when you make a performance, from idea to actual work?
For me, the initial need for each performance is to create a sensorial, emotional and rational tension between myself and the people present. I believe that the performer becomes a work of art only when the "other" identifies him/herself in what the performer does. The performer in him/herself is only a "partial body"; it is a body in solitude that can only be contemplated. My process always starts from the need to create a "completed body", an image in which the performer and the people are both present and participating.
So the initial need that starts the process can spring out from an episode, a place or an experience in which I think is worth to poetically dive in together. I start gathering elements related to the space/site trying to use them in a process that goes from a local/specific situation to a universal/general dimension.
Materials are naturally finding place in this process, in a kind of ritualisation of the shared aesthetic experience, and the actual work becomes a territory for sharing all this.
Q: What role does performance art have in your life / artistic praxis? Do you also work within other fields, like installation, sculpture, drawing, and other expressions? How do they influence / inform each other?
Performance art it's a medium, among the most appropriate, although not the only one. I said once “I see it like the room where Beuys met the coyote; room in which, today, we are the coyote”.(4*) I was using video, installation, sound, and drawing. Although I feel the need to know about the techniques of each kind of discipline, I don't see them as separated territories, but as mediums we can use to reach the people in the present, and through history.
(*4) Interview to Katerina Lambrou, in occasion of the first Cyprus International Performance Art Festival., Nicosia 2013. I am referring to the performance “I like America and America likes me” of J. Beuys.
Photo: Heidi Freymann
Q: With what kind of form / material do you express yourself and use in your work and how did you arrive at using this material?
I don't express myself through a material. I awake a possible significance of the material itself using it and leaving it exposed in its new aspect, being signified by the gazes and thoughts of the people. The technique in general is formed through the experience.
For example, the “movement” through space and time is formed through the experience of encountering the “other”, which could be the stranger, the different, the unknown. I need the “other” to give to the artwork a reason to be, so every “movement” I do needs to be “addressed toward” and not “inward”.
My tradition, which I see the same as any other tradition, is my basic form/material.
When I say “tradition” I don't speak only of visual art, but also of literature, philosophy, music; in a word everything to me is a possible “form/material” to be used.
Then there is “nature” and “technology” as basic elements influencing every tradition and everyday life. This triangle (Traditions, Nature, Technology) could be defined as the field in which I find my materials.
Today the process of globalisation is overwhelming every cultural locality and topical form of expression. To paraphrase Benjamin (*5), as individuals we are the “non reproducible original”, the “salvation” of the work of art in its unicity. So, for me “we”, as an ephemeral community, we are the FORM, and our MATERIALS are the basic elements which are common to each culture and its traditions.
(*5) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(1935, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), by HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin"Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes that the aura of a work of art is devalued by mechanical reproduction.
Q: How do you experience or consider the audience / surrounding? What space / surrounding do you find interesting to work in? How does your surrounding influence your work? Do you involve the public? If so, how?
It is a matter of love, and love acquires weight where hate and anger are there.. and today they are quite present. So we must start from a movement which is “addressed toward” the “audience/surroundings”. Not to claim ourselves, but to affirm the existence/importance of the individual. Not to say “we” as a homogeneous equality, but as a coexistence of differences with equal importance. Not to be decorative in our surroundings, but to signify our surroundings with the human presence in its vulnerability.
I am interested in relating myself to every space/surrounding in which I can arouse a constructive doubt around the certainties that characterise it.
I am influenced from the possibility that the “starting point” which I am offering during a performance can be received as a stimulation, to start an autonomous path in every individual. If not, I am doing a monologue, and I am not interested in monologues, but in dialogues.
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I don't express myself through a material. I awake a possible significance of the material itself using it and leaving it exposed in its new aspect, being signified by the gazes and thoughts of the people. The technique in general is formed through the experience.
For example, the “movement” through space and time is formed through the experience of encountering the “other”, which could be the stranger, the different, the unknown. I need the “other” to give to the artwork a reason to be, so every “movement” I do needs to be “addressed toward” and not “inward”.
My tradition, which I see the same as any other tradition, is my basic form/material.
When I say “tradition” I don't speak only of visual art, but also of literature, philosophy, music; in a word everything to me is a possible “form/material” to be used.
Then there is “nature” and “technology” as basic elements influencing every tradition and everyday life. This triangle (Traditions, Nature, Technology) could be defined as the field in which I find my materials.
Today the process of globalisation is overwhelming every cultural locality and topical form of expression. To paraphrase Benjamin (*5), as individuals we are the “non reproducible original”, the “salvation” of the work of art in its unicity. So, for me “we”, as an ephemeral community, we are the FORM, and our MATERIALS are the basic elements which are common to each culture and its traditions.
(*5) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(1935, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), by HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin"Walter Benjamin, is an essay of cultural criticism which proposes that the aura of a work of art is devalued by mechanical reproduction.
Q: How do you experience or consider the audience / surrounding? What space / surrounding do you find interesting to work in? How does your surrounding influence your work? Do you involve the public? If so, how?
It is a matter of love, and love acquires weight where hate and anger are there.. and today they are quite present. So we must start from a movement which is “addressed toward” the “audience/surroundings”. Not to claim ourselves, but to affirm the existence/importance of the individual. Not to say “we” as a homogeneous equality, but as a coexistence of differences with equal importance. Not to be decorative in our surroundings, but to signify our surroundings with the human presence in its vulnerability.
I am interested in relating myself to every space/surrounding in which I can arouse a constructive doubt around the certainties that characterise it.
I am influenced from the possibility that the “starting point” which I am offering during a performance can be received as a stimulation, to start an autonomous path in every individual. If not, I am doing a monologue, and I am not interested in monologues, but in dialogues.
<< Back