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In between individual and collective
An insight into working together with Clément Layes and Jasna L. Vinovrški on Flutgraben Performances
Sandra Man
I met Clément in 2015 at a workshop, and we started talking about our common interest in new contexts for performance art beyond the theater and the gallery space; I got to know Jasna at my first 3AM event, an art series, co-initiated by myself, Clément and Jasna, that was dedicated to this very question. At this event held on the freezing cold night of Dec. 30st 2015, I was touched by Jasna’s love for hosting and impressed by the generosity of the both of them: in a city with a highly competitive art scene, I found myself in a warm and vivid atmosphere that allowed artists to show what they were working on to a crowd that was, tuned by the hosts, supportive and welcoming towards what was being offered to them.
I was inspired by the difference they managed to make and we soon started meeting regularly and working together on what turned out to be one more season of 3AM, and which then, eventually and up until now, became Flutgraben Performances.
Reflecting on how we work together (the four of us, Moritz Majce joined too) a space comes to my mind, a space that is at the same time open and connecting, soft and demanding: it is the in-between us as individuals and us as a collective. I think that we are working from a very special place where we are no longer just singular entities and yet we are not giving ourselves up to complete a superior unity.
This space in-between that I mean and feel when thinking of us working together is situated beyond what we do and who we each are as individual artists and at the same time it does not unify us. It is a space that we constantly re-create, re-shape, re- investigate and re-discover. We don’t inhabit the space that we go to in order to meet and work together; we don’t take it for granted. It is not a territory, not a common ground where we come together. We do not identify with our work space: we never ask “what do we have in common?” and we never define roles, or who we are in this community.
I did not know this place before. It allows for the possibility to constantly get to know each other anew rather than the longing for an identity.
This spirit of curiosity is passed on to the artists who we ask to join Flutgraben Performances every year. It is crystallized in a format that we invented with the first group of invited artists in 2019 and which became the core instrument for connecting us: the »insights«.
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