Two short passages from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART

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I have such a strong belief in collaboration: as something thematically essential, as a place to make artistic breakthroughs that are simply impossible to make on one’s own, as a way to attempt to break our culture’s (and art’s) incredible over-emphasis on individualism and the individual artist, as a way to be a little bit less alone in the world. At the same time, I generally find the actual lived experience of collaboration to be incredibly difficult. Perhaps psychologically I’m not really made for it. I guess there’s a lot of tension in this paradox, and some of that tension must be what energizes the work. As I was writing this, a strange sentence suddenly popped into my head: the work of PME-ART is both too collaborative and not collaborative enough. There is something off-kilter about our way of collaborating with others, and out of this something I believe a different kind of performance might emerge.


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Yes, I like that way of putting it, our “performances are also about escaping performance,” but I think for me this is almost true of everything that has value, that it somehow needs to attempt to transcend previous conceptions of what it might be or become. I believe somewhere Alain Badiou says philosophy must also embrace anti-philosophy, and that has something to do with my approach as well: performance must also embrace anti-performance, and also embrace everything else as well, everything that’s outside of performance, so much of life that most performance so casually ignores. I want something unexpected to happen, to be surprised, and to surprise myself.

“Finding ways to make performances incapable” is also a formulation I’m very much attracted to. I think, for me, this also has something to do with life: I don’t feel I’m able to live and yet I somehow continue to live anyway. Sometimes I say that I’m good at art, bad at life. And this feeling forces me to live my struggles with life within art, within performance. So the performance can never feel okay, there is so much conflict, difficulty, ambiguity, uncertainty in my relations towards it, and in the act of performing it in public, in front of people who might very well find life so much easier than I do. On the other hand, perhaps many of them find it just as difficult. Performance (or whatever we wish to call it) might be one of the places where we can find out.




You can read the full interview here: Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART



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