"I’m flabbergasted in seeing to what degree people think it’s normal to be alive. Disfigurement in art is a way to distance oneself from everyday life, seeing the world with fresh eyes and and feel the strangeness of the world"
MASTERCLASS/WORKSHOP
MASTERCLASS/WORKSHOP
Tobe covered with clay is an initiatory act that can be found in all primitive cultures. Clay has a liberating and creative power. A body covered with clay, as the primitives say, passes into the world of the spirits, between the sculpture and the ghost: It is a transfigured body, in dialogue with the “beyond”. For us, this “beyond” is the depth of the performer’s soul.
To cover oneself with the clay is also paradoxically to wash oneself from an artificial and cultural world to finally make contact with one’s interiority. This blind work will amplify our sense of touch and proprioception. In the development of touch, time passes slowly and the psyche of the performer enters into a form of singularity. Aristotle stated: touch is the foundation of the soul.
I is remarkable for someone to achieve the liberation from individuality, to surpass these boundaries of selfhood and identity embracing the possibilities of being, the disfigurement in this performances a trigger for this process of appreciating life itself.
Step one : work alone
Discovery of the clay and its ductility and look for which is ideal for sculpting.
Exploration of clay on the face, clay becoming your own flesh and mediation to feel and think your face, ie your identity, a form of meditation to return to oneself.
The link question: mask and presence. Reflections on the function of the mask and how it affects our personality. Here is a very special clay mask because a moving mask, a new concept in art, a mask that is not to hide but to reveal oneself, and laying bare you feel, a mask becomes living.
Everyone makes a “Transfiguration” alone in front of the others and tries to start from his/her own feelings and kinesthesis in order to explore and discover our inner man.
The people in the group compare the different approaches for each individual and this reveal of our personality.
We will have a careful consideration on how to move, how to dance with clay. How the clay and this blind work increase our sensation of touch and sense of feeling, self-presence.
Step two : work as a couple
The same work but with one other, Transfiguration become Hybridation.
Step three : work as a group
Everyone covers someone else’s face and body, to the blind, a great moment of sensuality.
Work on the contact, bashfulness, modesty at first dressed and after naked.
The body of the other, the other becomes a continuity of his own, the group becomes one body.
