source: (c) Lygia ClarkThis project consist on a series of experimental actions revisiting Lygia Clark’s “Estruturacao do Self”.
Started at the end of seventies, “Estruturacao do Self” defines the last artistic phase of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. For that project, she interacted for one hour with her “patients”, whom she met one on one three times a week, by using different objects on their bodies. She not only extensively commented on these therapies, but they where also recorded visually. For me, what comes out of these documents is a mystical aura surrounding the participants, and the intensity of Clark’s thoughts, highlighting the ambivalence of some concepts relating to art, as well as social sciences, like readymade, spectator, alienation, rationality, …
During a residence at CoCA in Torun (Poland), I revisited and revised Clark’s “Estruturacao do Self” by doing a series of experimental actions for which I used tactics of appropriation, derivation, and reinterpretation. Also dealing with the local context of Torun, I have thus produced in-situ objects, and inhabitants of the city were involved in these “therapy” sessions.
The process of realization of this project generated multiple layers of interconnecting questions, such as simultaneous movements of repulsion and attraction. Thus, an inner struggle was produced as I sought to define my artistic practice in relation to Clark’s; I attempted to become her, while needing to be myself. In addition, my relation with the participants during the sessions was suffused with physical manifestations of emotions such as love, joy, sensuality, anger, fear and humiliation; the work itself was circumscribed by shifting borders, opening a space for unresolved categorizations. Consenquently, “I am the Other” could be seen as a bad pastiche, but it also can be positioned as a sincere homage to Clark’s legacy.The project was made in collaboration with Center of Contemporary art - Torun (CoCA) and Conseil des Art du Canada. I wish to thank the participants and the staff of CoCA.
