performance art and poetry
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Absence can ignite want and trigger desire. Absence and presence go together. They are not the same but it is impossible to think one without the other. Without presence, absence becomes meaningless. Without absence, presence is taken for granted and has nothing to be measured up against. This linguistic dynamism comes into play in ABSENCE – underlining an art project with ethical invocations.
The performance is based on a poem by an Afghan woman poet, who’s name we cannot say because her life now depends on her anonymity. It is the force of this text and the urgency of its author’s voice that fuses with and motivates ABSENCE as an art project and an identity-veil. The woman poet, whose nameless condition is a living-writing necessity, must seek protection for her self, for her loves ones, from this absence of authorship, through concealment from the world. What happens to a self, when the given name becomes impossible? What does it mean to be a nameless writer, a nameless artist?
The poem, “I am blame my name is woman”, is presented as a desperate cry from the voiceless, subjugated, raped, beaten and tortured Afghan woman, exchanged as a commodity in a clinical transaction between men. It is addressed to the women of the western world, who celebrate their own success, and in the process become blind to their otherwordly sisters’ endless suffering and humiliation. Upon reading this poem, the artist has been moved to act, as witness and medium. She has taken it upon herself to embroider the entire poem on a large piece of cloth, while reciting its words to her audience. She invites other women to join in, to sit and embroider with her, creating a social and interactive dimension to the performance. Her task is almost endless, painstakingly slow and emotionally draining.
“The artist keeps a picture in her mind og her grand-mother all dressed in black and sitting in the corner of the large glass veranda in her norwegian summer home, embroidering Hardanger stitches on white linnen cloth whith white linnen thread. It is this picture in her mind the artist revives when she now sits and embroiders each letter of the poem in the curtain fabric.
The thread used is taken from the curtain fabric itself. The embroidered letters are revealed by the holes the special stiches make.
The stitches are in Hardanger-seam, a traditional Norwegian embroidery technique, usually executed with white thread on white fabric. The seam is made up of stitched decorations around geometrically patterned holes, essentially making absence stand out, making beauty around of what is not there. Sewing by hand is an intimate and laborious process, which brings you close to the material, in touch with the motif, in that it takes time and concentration to produce it. Embroidery has lingering or meditative qualities but also functions as a way to create order and embellishment out of otherwise insignificant fabric. There is a twist through this particular stitch: playing with the artist’s own heritage– as well as linking the artist to the identity of the other woman in the poem, and the act of writing that the nameless poet has committed and which the artist, in turn, has become committed to convey to her audience. The stitch is that which binds together – relationally, materially, through words, into actions of solidarity – the voiceless child-bride, the nameless woman poet, and the artist.”
[def: 1 the state of being away. 2 the time during which a person or thing is away. 3. the fact of being without something: lack.
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