in rooms of memories that were not

My dialogue with a space (an old house with a long history) and with a famous deceased artist, Mihelic, and his characters. Dreaming in those rooms and bringing dreams into visual manifestations. Performing in my own installation, video is becoming part of the installation. Performing with the installation and the recorded performance. A dance with an invisible presence. Some version of Alice in some in-between land.

A famous modernist male artist has been drawing a female figure, Daphne, all his life. I saw her mostly portrayed as a corpse. He seems to think he loves her, he certainly desires her, but he objectifies her. His images remind me of the lust murders, there is something sinister and deadly about such objectification. I feel concerned, in my body and my heart, as a woman-identifying person and as an artist. There was a sort of tragedy for me in this relationship between them, or rather, his way of relating to her. Where is she? Her image is present everywhere, but she is still somehow absent.

I remember the artist’s model, the model of most male artists of the past, someone who is existing only as an object of desire, not a full human being. I remember John’s Berger’s ways of seeing. There are so many ghost images of female body in art.

I constructed this installation to welcome his images and to respond to them, by calling Murder! But I have also made something that I find beautiful and want to explore in a sensual way, with my body. It is a dream-like interior with which I interact, and I am imagening my lover, who isn’t present, that I dance with. Maybe I dance only with the image of my love, not with the actual person. I try to be acutely sensitive to the presences, to the ghosts, but also I seem like a ghost, an image, when recorded. The camera follows me in this dance in a sensual way, almost as another invisible presence, she dances with me and anticipates my moves.

I am listening to the space. It is a dance of death, but I also feel my body more then usually. I am listening also to myself. This is the dance of who I was and who I am, in some dream state, in between time, in some fictional space. But I have created this dream and I am moving in it, so in some way, I am reclaiming this space and Daphne is becoming her own.