Take It Bend it or Leave It would not exist without the work of artists who have generously contributed their reflections on the notion of 'rule'. The curators would like to give an enormous thanks to the space at ArtEZ, the artists, the technicians, and our tutors.
While I'm Crossing
Isabella Arboleda
While I’m Crossing is an audiovisual work motivated by the desire of questioning what femininity has been labeled as, by heteronomic context. It looks towards the ambiguity and the fluid nature that femininity can have, defending the individual and subjective experience of every woman. Ambiguity in gender is translated in this work, into the in-between spaces in the public sphere. These in-between spaces are seen as spaces that hold an undefined story such as transit zones, places under construction, abandoned, finally dissonant from normality.
Isabella Arboleda works with the body and its implications. She searches for moments of transformation issued from the underlying cosmos of the bodies and their contexts. Her most recent work, Practicing Death-done in collaboration with the artist Lisah Adeaga and presented in Belgium in June 2020-, marks the starting point of an ongoing and long term research on death and transformation. She is currently working with the SIDEWARDS collective, a group of fourteen international artists based in Belgium, while developing in parallel her own artistic work.
Option Constraints
Digz
Rules are an arbitrary construct.
The Queen is allowed unrestricted movement across the board, the pawn a single square forward move. Themis blindfold let an eye appear as the imbalance is the fruit of a willful decision.
Born in 1985 in Machecoul, France, Digz was a tattoo artist in the Netherlands from 2014 to 2019, and in Germany since then.
Me
Eryfili Drakopoulou
Me is an exploration of my identity within the women of my recent ancestry. The photos depict women of my family tree, from my mother to my great-grandmothers. You are invited to dig your finger in red ink and mark one photo of your choice. You can mess, alter, transform, reveal or erase my perception of these women thus the formation of me. I invite you to shake and reverse the core of this identity quest.
I am Eryfili. I come from Greece where I studied Contemporary Dance Practices and Theatre Arts. I have worked and collaborated with various artists on physical theatre, choreography and performance art. I am currently pursuing my Masters in Performance Practices at the ArtEZ University of the Arts, and developing my practice which has been slowly shifting into visual work. My research deals with the skin as an intertemporal archive of experiences, lives and events.
Photo by George Vlahonikolos
neither bread nor __
Cecilie Fang
What is the function of a chair? To be sat on.
And how does it look? Typically a seat with four legs.
We learn that one object has one specific function from growing up with certain societal norms. And we don’t question it. Instead, our brain's two-channeled system keeps recognizing these objects as having one specific function only.
So what happens to the viewer when one specific-shaped object such as bread is suddenly put in alternative situations that are not seen as normatively correct? Situations that our brain recognizes as 'wrong' and doesn't follow the rules.
Featuring Romana Klementisova, photo by Cecilie Fang/Michaela Cagánová
I'm a 21 year old girl, who recently moved to the Netherlands to study at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, yet photography still feels new to me. I moved here from Denmark, but I’m also half Chinese. A mix of two opposite cultures.
Photography still feels new to me, since it’s something I discovered last year. Now it’s a visual way of expressing myself, discovering the world and creating sub-worlds that I wouldn’t be without.
The artist is tired
Gustavo Tome Garcia
In relation to the theory of Byung Chul Han, in Burnout Society, we are “too dead to be alive and too alive to be dead”. This feeling of always being tired is consuming a lot of people that are struggling with anxiety and depression. There are several reasons for that, first of all, the capitalist system that always sells the image that only accepts in society a productive person. We have to produce above everything. Social media also has a big influence in the way that we perform productivity and happiness. Instagram was considered the worst social media for mental health. This small action is an experimentation of this theory and also a provocation of the question: Is it possible to be unproductive?
I am Gustavo Tomé Garcia, I am 24 years old and I am from Brazil. I am Cancer but I do no cry that much.
(I WILL WRITE MORE LATER)
For sure you can see my Instagram account to understand who I am: @gustavotome_.
(FUCK I DID NOT HAVE TIME)
MOSTRABUNDA #nudes
Lucas Koester
Lucas Koester & BRECHOCollectives
This piece is mostly about solitude, it's also about love. It'´s something like pulling my skin out so you can really see me. it´s an overwhelmed disinterested dance of a bodysculpure that can´t keep or hold its shapes together. it´s a wet dance, of bodily fluids, but now is also completely away. and on these screens there´s no volume and perception isn´t really the only friend you have.
Lucas is a Brazilian design and performance artist, etc...This platform (or collective) with which all his works are presented was created in 2011, and has since produced, among other works, a trilogy about love; family; and death. (#nudes 2016, Catastrophe 2018, HAIKAI 2019) Always in collaboration with other artists, Lucas believes the borders between areas should always be more blurred, transitioning from dance, fashion, photography, collage, performance, mixed media, gambiarras de estilo, copy paste edit. remix it.
this thing keeps happening to me when i THINK I PRESSED THE CAPS LOCK button but i didn't.
Antrianna Moutoula
Antrianna Moutoula (Athens, 1994) has been performing, filming and writing since 2011. She graduated from the Fine Arts department of Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) in 2017. Main focus of her work is the performativity of intimate relationships and the uneventful events of everyday life. She is continuously puzzled with how to perform the real, which often leads her to creating participatory works or inviting on stage non trained performers as her lover, family, and guests of the restaurant where she works. She intends for the process to stay open, the results unknown, the planned encounters direct and alive. She is currently pursuing the Master of Performance Practices in ArtEZ University of the Arts, where she researches streams of consciousness as a form of daily autobiography. Her works have been presented in Stedelijk Museum / Amsterdam, SSBA Salon / Amsterdam, Frascati Theater / Amsterdam, Arco-Centro de Arte e Comunicaçao Visual / Lisbon and Treno sto Rouf / Railway carriage theater / Athens amongst others. www.antriannamoutoula.com
IATO
Giovanna Chiara Pasini
The rule around here is a panorama of skeletons, the Calabrian ‘un-finished’.
People started to build houses, maybe while waiting their emigrated sons return maybe to move in a better residence, then the sons never came back and/or they finished the money. These monsters of disillusionment can be symbols of the failing economy and the progressive depopulation of whole regions. Often precarious structures, sharp, gutted, exposed, suspended, seeming been left mouth agape.
Inspired by D.Thomas ‘Under the milk wood’ (24h voices, dreams and thoughts, not bodies) and ‘Quite Early One Morning’ (the awakening of a little village in a winter dawn and the actions that make the inhabitants inhabitors), here is the attempt of configuring presences where absence reigns, creating a virtual occupation of skeletal places. But can the virtual one be considered presence?
This experiment would like to be just the start of a research about these issues and the potential use of such kind of places: is it possible to subvert the rule of their empty ugliness? Could this phenomenon have an extra-regional/national appeal?
In any case, it’s necessary to deal with the place you belong to.
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I’m from Italy and I graduated as an actress at Teatro della Pergola in Florence. After exploring different places and making various experiences, I am now back to my region looking for new opportunities.
Relationscapes: an exercise on waiting
Maria Pisiou
Concept/Performance Maria Pisiou
Sound Design Niovi Kitsiou
Researcher Mentor Fenia Kotsopoulou
Dramaturgical Advice/ Researcher Mentor Julyen Hamilton
Camera Julyen Hamilton
Editing Maria Pisiou
Production Maria Pisiou, Master in Theatre Practices, ArtEZ, University of Arts
Inspired by a poem composed instantly from social media sources in the period of quarantine in Athens, ‘Relationscapes, an exercise on waiting’ is a video dance performance where the values of instant composition are transformed into dramaturgical parameters and the state of waiting becomes a practice of listening and a condition for the coincidence to happen. The performer creates a context into which she makes decisions for the set of the space on the shooting time of the performance.
Influenced by the New York Movement, the composition of scores constitutes the map of the choreography. Approaching the dancing body as an archive, and the score-based structure of the choreography as a dynamic form which can generate ‘infinite worlds’, the performer is in a constant negotiation between following the structure (the order of the scores) and messing up the structure. Stimulus from the surrounding environment, the air, the space, the sound, the ground, the dancing body, the compositional mind and objects are there; to affect and be affected, blending into each other.
Maria Pisiou is a Greek-born dancer, choreographer, researcher, experimental video maker, and teacher, currently based in the Netherlands. She holds a BA both in Dance and Pedagogy, and a Master in Artistic Research and Performance Practices (Master in Theatre Practices, ArtEZ, University of Arts). Her choreographic and conceptual work is expressed through the composition of scores, sound, video, poems, movement, and the use of objects in order to create dance performances, site specific projects, installations, immersive environments, moving and poetic landscapes. She is interested in finding ways to make visible elements, thoughts, desires, memories which are invisible but still define what can be seen and has been done. You can find more about her work here: https://www.pisioumaria.com/
walk with me
Foivi Psevdou
I walk in a space co-habited by others without destination. What/how is my
pace? What is its agency? I invite you to walk with me and discover your own pace. Can we still walk together?
Rules are in place to safeguard to control to order our co-existence I engage with two rules
NO RUNNING IN THE HALLWAYS
KEEP 1.5 m DISTANCE
while keeping my own pace. How is walking and running perceived in this case? What happens when a certain combination of rules and their interpretation creates stagnation? How would performer and spectators negotiate, deal with, overcome this stagnation?
The intersecting spheres of theatre, education and play have shaped my work as a language teacher, theatre pedagogue and actress. Between Athens and Arnhem, I am pursuing a master’s in Theatre Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL) and developing my practice in theatre and performance art. My current research investigates the inner temporality of my body in relation to the perception and experience of time in public space. I am interested in exploring ways of embodying alternate temporalities and hosting multiple experiences of time in public.
SAUDADE
Ana Luisa Brito Ribeiro
The work arose from a urgency to talk about the feeling of saudade, so complex, sad, desolate, frightening, immersive,
almost deadly...
It is an attempt to relive a past full of beautiful things, intense moments and precisely that past that I miss.
The videos were all taken indoors. In quarantine, the only option is home-based, this intimate work talks about me, my past, my saudades and all the chaos that I carry.
Ana Luisa Brito, is a Brazilian actress, born in the interior of Minas Gerais, graduated at Escola Superior de Artes Célia Helena in São Paulo in 2018. Passionate about theater, cinema and everything that makes her an artist.
It has to start somewhere
Peim van der Sloot
It’s an eight millimeter circular red sticker, available in packs of 540 for under one euro. But, this tiny dot answers the question that powers the art market: “Is that work sold?”
These red dots are a common sight, located on the walls of galleries and art fairs, to indicate that a work has already been sold. It has emerged in many forms and languages within my work, they have allowed me to question the value, commerciality, and collectivity of art. I encourage artists and arts organizations to attempt to create alternative micro-economies. My propositions are about art, not as a luxury made possible by economic growth, but rather as a new way to set the terms on which exchange in the economy takes place.
Peim van der Sloot (1986) grew up on in Argentina, graduated from the art academy in Utrecht (HKU) in 2010 and has since been working in the lively niches between visual arts, design and performance. Through a range of graphic techniques including sticker-collages and silkscreen he developed a very characteristic style.
Within fixed grids he manages to introduce a very welcome flair of anarchy with strong contrasts and vibrating colors. The same playfulness is applied on the sale of his works. He questions the assumptions on which our economy is based on, but also his artistic practice, constantly challenging both.
THE RULE
Ella Tighe
REPEAT is a durational work in which Ella attempts to REPEAT selected elements of the other performance works happening within Take it, Bend it or Leave it. The work will investigate what happens when the performer engages with surrendering into artistic propositions which have not been created by the performer herself. It will engage with varied modes of repetition and endurance as tools to embody and sustain the particular state of which the work demands.
This work is a live experiment.
Ella Tighe is a dance artist, performance maker, yoga teacher from the UK. Her practice is routed in movement, dancing and embodiment and is currently addressing the topic of surrendering. The work is usually processual and holistic. It includes writing, speaking and text making as a process of accessing other forms of embodying surrender. The research into surrendering addresses questions surrounding agency, creating hospitable spaces for performer and audience, states of consciousness/embodiment and the potential or question of risk, edges and vulnerability.
Photo by Fenia Kotospoulou/Daz Disley