The Tea Party
a workshop by Helena Dietrich
14th & 15th of March 2017
from 10.00am to 6pm both days.
@ a.pass 4th floor
“A detailed and exact description of an object, including representations of its spirit language in conversational form and its daily round of activities, demonstrates to it (really to the spirit) that the performer of the ikar {chant} has intimate knowledge of it and can control it. (...) The subsequent narration of actions and events, addressed to the spirit world, causes their simultaneous occurrence in the mirror image physical world.”
Joel Sherzer, Verbal Art in San Blas: Kuna Culture Through Its Discourse
In this workshop I propose practices to create sensitivity towards the relations we build with images and aesthetics. As a development/othering of my former project Becoming Lili I invite the group to encounter alternative forms of being-with-oneself through creating an auto-(science?)-fiction story through self-image-modifications. The practices are based on improvised physical explorations of physiognomic aspects of the body-image collected in several years of experimentation.
We will use surfaces, materials, clothes and props as entrances into parallel realities within ourselves. The clothes and accessories will become our vessels to travel into unknown (and unconscious?) parallel forms of being. Trying to establish a perspective from outer-space, the future or a parallel universe we will revisit common aesthetics with an outside eye. This approach can be understood as a ritualistic act of re-configuration of known aesthetics revealing another relation to them. We will use clothing like a pharmakon: what pollutes us can also clean us! By triggering the optical unconscious we can transform sensuously a commoditised visual world into a psychological cleansing process from cultural inherited aesthetics. Acknowledging the ability of three-dimensional images and materials as determinations of our perception of self is already an attempt to empower ourselves at changing our/the reality. Not only in words but also in materialising this reality into visible and tangible new object-beings.
In two days we will approach the ‘image’ from two divergent points of departure: the image’s impact from outside to inside and the creation of an image from inside to outside.
Looking for alternative beings, bodies and genders we will draw inspiration first from an inward inspection, giving a space for inner perceptions and phantasies and then imagine how they could be actualised into material presences -as bodies. By turning the inside out, we will ‘design’ a wardrobe for a speculative body and search for an embodied aesthetic. An invitation to explore the elasticity of the image and as in a process of channeling, body and image/form will interpenetrate.
For the first time this practice will not be experienced in one-on-one setting only but collectively in a group. At the end of the days we will all together have a ‘tea-party’ gathering our newly discovered alien-fiction-beings. Their voices will be enhanced through microphones, loop-machines, effect-paddles and speakers and recorded as a divergent radio-show. Supported by the sonic experience and other than filming or taking pictures the focus will be on the ‘invisible matter’ the modifications bring out. Which kind of voices and words will the other image-beings create?
Helena Dietrich
The German designer and performance artist Helena Dietrich is since four years working and living in Brussels. After her Master in European Media at the University of Portsmouth, she conducted a research project at a.pass in Brussels, a postgraduate program for performance arts and scenography. Both in her artistic and in her design approach she is interested in the analyzation of the impact of visual information on identity and therefore culture. In her artistic work she lays out the significance of the symbolism that is embedded in esthetics (and by extension our identity). Her work has been exhibited amongst others at Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Beursschouwburg Brussels, and Cinema Galeries Brussels.
