Profile - Simon Piasecki

In 2000 I was an invited artist at the 3rd International Festival of Experimental Art in St Petersburg, Russia, where I performed five new works and was featured in a full page article in the St Petersburg Times. The final work Underground at the Winter Palace considered my frustration at an inability to locate the lost family of my Grandfather in the Ukraine. It led directly to their discovery one week later, after 57 years. Much of my work as an individual and collaborative artist throughout the nineties was connected by a discourse of displacement and identity.

I have always been fascinated by the conversations that I draw from collaboration and find that I have a natural drive to work with other artists, as well as in isolation. Following Russia I embarked on a series of collaborations with the artist Glyn Davies Marshal, beginning with a four day residency together in the Sanctuary Wood preserved trenches of Ypres, Belgium, funded by Yorkshire Arts. We subsequently worked for two days in a chapel on a live research durational work called ‘Demobbed’ as a commission for the Chester Literature Festival.

I have also completed a number of collaborative installation performances with the artist Walt Shaw, three of which particularly pertain to my research project – Mendel’s Garden, Timepoints and Entropic. All of these works are Arts Council Funded and have or are been professionally toured. In the last 18 months I have performed in two professional short films and completed three commissions as scriptwriter for the Dance Theatre productions of Being Frank Physical Theatre and Mobius Dance. In the last 18 months I have delivered papers to PARIP NW on ‘Auto-Performance’, to the  ‘Theatres of Science’ conference, Glamorgan and CPaRA’s inaugural ‘What’s in the Tin?’ conference on ‘The Evolution of Science in BET4’s Live Arts Laboratory’ and a paper on ‘Positionality of the Self’ to the Centre for Performance Research’s ‘Towards Tomorrow?’ conference in Aberystwyth (as an invited ‘Travelling Performance’ panel member). 

Statement

‘I have this bottle of water [said the artist Man Ray Hsu, holding the article aloft]. The bottle is from Tai Pai but I don’t know about the water – perhaps everywhere; from the ground, Slovenia, Paris, I don’t know. But perhaps my identity is a little like this’ (Man Ray Hsu; Manifesta 3 Symposium, 1999).                                                                                 

Goffman’s assertion that we consistently perform the self infers that the ‘self’ is constructed according to the protocols of social identity (1969). This reaffirms Artaud’s violent fear of social control at the most physical and organic level. Fear of the ‘other’ is in some respects an expression of one’s own membership of an ideological power-structure. By asserting a view of the ‘other’ the self is positioned according to place (as opposed to space) and societal belonging.

Constructs of group and individual security are identified through terms such as ‘belonging’ that designate and repel ‘outsiders’. Insurgence is feared and fear reinforces the structure of power. The irony here is that our inherited ‘belonging’ is arbitrarily founded on our location at birth, which might follow the relatively recent relocation of a parent or grandparent. The positionality of the corporeal self may differ from the positionality of the Self, complexly founded on discourses of nationhood, family, institution and environment.  In a post-colonial context, but also at the beginning of the 21st century, human diaspora is a significant global fact that contributes to a particularly Western pathology of the border. Mestrovic predicted that the West would itself become ‘Balkanised’, or increasingly and defensively fragmented, rather than achieving a global and democratic triumph of human rights (1994). Ironically, many Westerners can refer specifically to the migration of recent ancestry: border crossings which so often inferred a psycho-mythical journey from oppression to opportunity (characterised by the taxonomy of East to West).

Whilst the rather loosely banded terms of ‘East’ and ‘West’ might equally apply to the monstrous wall in Palestine as to that of Berlin, the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ are also pejorative in that they imply power and license rather than numerical strength. We hastily need to re-present a notion of the ‘other’ that exposes mediated political representation and recognises the semantic lie of a nationality. I am therefore most interested in drawing out, through praxis, the ‘other’ in my Self and its location in the spaces between belonging either to family, nation, institution or geography. As an artist I would like to build upon the notion of the palimpsest, defined by Schechner as the document or artwork that has been repeatedly reinscribed, leaving traces of that which went before and therefore an expression of its own history (Schechner, p.127). Spaces between belonging are delineated by the diachronic and synchronic: the constructs of identity are essentially diachronic because they draw upon geneology and personal, cultural and national history. The positioning of the Self according to givens of culture, place and ideology, however, is synchronic because it depends upon the complex influence of present (or very recent) experience or circumstance (education, location, class, gender, race and perhaps vocation). An ‘important’ physical journey is perhaps both, because it re-positions the Self following a durational and physical event of linearity. The praxis of this thesis is based on such journeys.

An act of self-location along an unclear route requires the transfer of a representation of location (a map) to a reality of location and back again. This journey between representation and experience is interlocuted by oneself as a site of a performance, to articulate where one is and how one represents where one is. This then is also the difference between the report and the record – one is quantitative data (a representation of ‘fact’), whilst the other is qualitative experience (a subjective ontological expression of ‘truth’). This is a fairly Jungian model because it considers the affective domain of self as opposed to the simply cognitive; it validates the duel existence of fact (as object) and experience (as subject) and suggests the importance of creative frames (artistic practices) in the cultural discourses that form social identity. The problem with this is its rather structuralist consideration of binaries. Fact and experience are not separable and the frame of any report, record or indeed artwork is itself questionable and questioning.

Irit Rogoff’s study of the contemporary crisis of geographical identity and belonging is demarcated by works of visual culture (2000). Her study considers useful, if overt, analogies of, amongst others, mapping, luggage and borders. This research project will propose a triadic extrapolation of similar contexts, including Luggage: belongings that express identity and membership to family, nation, place and institution; the Journey: a physical action that re-locates the corporeal self; and Mapping: the assertion of power through the cartographic location of self. These analogies are useful within a context of praxis because of their definitive relationship to any act of auto-performance:  Luggage is   auto in that it reflects the personal subject ; the journey is bio in that it is of the body; and Mapping is essentially graphic as an inscribed representation of the  space. Therefore these three contexts of luggage, journey and map signify the auto/bio/graphic and are represented by the subject and body in a space.

Current Projects

Praxis aims:

1. To conduct an original investigation into the location of self and being in contemporary artistic practices, that extrapolates place and culture from the border and nationality.
2. To explore, via the discourse of the performative event, perceptions of cultural incursion and the paradigms that govern them.
3. To construct artistic strategies that respond to these paradigms in respect of performance, reflexive and critical writing, considering the ancestry of nationhood as it is extrapolated from the ancestry of self and a post-structural geography of belonging.
4. To establish a multi-textural language of auto/bio/graphical performance that seeks a discourse of the ‘other’ by presenting the self as a palimpsest of inheritance without centre.  

To articulate these, a  series of works aim to extrapolate contexts of locational identity through subject, body and space:

The Nightflight Project takes audiences for a trek across high ranges of hills, beginning with the Clwydian range in Wales. It  treats the peaks as halting places, or stations, along a journey that is both physical and meta-physical, with multi-textual works appearing on each and connecting in a spoken narrative of dispossession. The research and development for this work has been underway since November 2004. This is significantly funded by the Arts Council of Wales, is produced by Jess Tyrell of Germination and is artistically directed as a collaboration with Teddy Kiendl. The research pilot will be produced in September of 2006 with a main event in May of 2007.

Lessons in Language (working title) will be a publication employing the format of the fast-learn Language packages – a plastic wallet containing a handbook and CD Rom. This will didactically present a series of Live Artworks as a ‘how to’ guide and will be presented as a gallery launch event with readings and examples performed. Some of the performances that this draws on as a series have already taken place whilst others are planned. The work condenses and commodifies prejudice with ‘lessons’ such as ‘Rich Tea Conversations’, ‘Line Dance Semaphore’, ‘Talking Like My Father’ and ‘Talking to the Dead’. It is the result of a number of collaborative works with the artist Glyn Davies Marshal.

A Wonderful Engine employs the rather useful allegory of Gulliver and the Lilliputians. The work was first shown in November 2005 in Chester and seeks to install a landscape of buildings (constructed of internally lit flight maps) and miniature communities, around a tightly bound figure. As with Swift’s original text there is an itinerary of the contents of the figure’s pockets – the Lilliputian King ordered this in that they might assess the giant’s threat or intention from an interpretation of culturally obscure artefacts. This is reminiscent of a customs procedure in the crossing of a national border. The problem with this, or any customs procedure, is that the interpretation of the object-texts is culturally derived from the position of their own social constructs, the humour for Swift being that safe objects are accorded threat status and dangerous ones the opposite.  The performed work also utilised a live application of acupuncture to the palm and forearm.

Mendels Garden is a performance installation that has now been shown three times since 2004 and is a collaboration with Walt Shaw. It sought an analogy with Mendel’s experiments to elaborate the basic rules of inheritance. Mendel worked painstakingly over years, collecting data from crosses of pea plants that displayed varying characteristics. Out of what to a lesser mind seemed chaotic he founded the first laws of inheritance that recognise the heterozygous re-emergence of the recessive gene. In the installation thousands of peas vibrate in a garden of vertically mounted speaker cones. As the peas are shaken loose, the artists attempt to map and measure their position and generation in a vain attempt to amass meaningful data. What emerges is a densely over-inscribed space, a history of the endeavour, a contamination of the objective. The work was first presented with a paper at the ‘Theatres of Science’ Conference in Glamorgan in September of 2004.

Border Case is a devised and scripted work of physical theatre that occurs in a traverse setting and includes four short plays that are now complete. This was first staged with undergraduates with a view to creating a professional work for tour. Border Case is a work of dramatic and surreal poetry that employs the metaphor of train tracks as the traces of ancestry on a journey of tragic exile, internment, death and belonging. There is no single clear narrative and sections of the work are characterised as verbs with a duality of meaning – ‘walking’, ‘camping’, ‘sleeping’ and ‘fencing’. Research and development is complete on this project, which is completely staged using forty vintage cases and the intention is now to fund and direct a compact rehearsal period followed by a small-scale tour.