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And while I’m revising and rearranging these last few lines a day after a strong earthquake in Zagreb, at a time of countless restrictions aiming to prevent the spreading of coronavirus, reducing art currently to the level of the exchange of digital records in the virtual world, her acuteness to social issues and focus on the community assume a new dimension. Will art the way we know it survive, will the social systems before the forces of nature change to embrace better and more equal practices, depends primarily on the strength of both the immediate and the broader human community. Clearly, aesthetics will have to give way to ethics, but art doubtlessly builds the community spirit. It draws from jointly designed reality and gives back to the society in a re- evaluated form.
Ivana Slunjski
Title
Sub-title - author (Vincent)
A few years ago, Clément used to play a collective game consisting of placing an object in the middle of a group of participants and, following the principles of free association, finding a new name for it - or a title - that would be accepted by the group. On the contrary, I am now wondering what object, image or place would best correspond to the name: "public in private".
The first thing that comes to mind is the Flutgraben studio. It is becoming increasingly rare, among performance makers and institutions, for works to be identified with their place of production, piece after piece. The visual artist has a studio, the writer has an office or a café or a library, but choreographers and directors are often, by necessity, in residence far from home and from their everyday life. Nomadism has its advantages, but it also narrows research to fixed periods and floating contexts. I have always admired the daily, the private and above all the chosen dimension of the Flutgraben studio.
But this is too obvious to embody the name "public in private".
Perhaps we should enter the studio.
There are the ghosts of the old works and therefore probably also the ghosts of future works. Sometimes they are the same. I mean those objects and bits of altered objects that have always been the real protagonists of Clément's pieces. Their shape, their attributes, their imperfections have determined the times of rehearsal. Objects that live day after day in the studio that we visit.
It is probably the core of the work that has been carried out for the past ten years to have succeeded in raising this small tribe of objects, and to have given them the status of an assembly. I know most of them quite well.
The storage accessories, the suitcases and bags, the crushed storage boxes, if they don't enter the set, fully belong to this assembly. With their wounds. I recall a suitcase wheel lost on a platform at the Albany train station in New York State in temperatures below -20°. For quite some time we had been rolling the enormous suitcase full of accessories. But this time, from this station in Albany, we had to drag it. It took place in the manner of a clown act: first the negotiation to find out who would take the suitcase upon arrival at the station, then the act of disembarking the train, Clément making the suitcase roll in front of me, a wheel collapsing under its weight and old age, and me doomed to accidentally shoot it off during the walk with a tragi-comic virtuosity, causing the wheel to get lost under the train. Moreover, when we arrived in Troy a few minutes later, a sign indicated the existence of a meningitis epidemic on the campus where we were to play.
The wheel must be somewhere in America and therefore a part of " public in private " as well.
I'm looking for it.
A few months ago, returning to the studio for a public evening after several years of relative distance, I saw a small piece of wood that I know well and for which I feel a form of tenderness under the new tribune. It was wrapped in grey scotch tape. It reminded me of friends. It was this little piece of wood that was alone on stage at the beginning of the play Things that surround us and on which we placed the patched chair, a sort of minimal crutch from which the whole universe of objects was thrown out of balance. I told myself that this little piece of wood that represented "nothing" in the show could be my "public in private". It is solid and enigmatic enough for that.
Vincent Weber
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