The original language of the text is Estonian.
At the end of last year, I spent a month in residency in the black box of Kanuti Gildi SAAL, also known asPüha Vaimu SAAL. In relative solitude there, I tried to make the theatrical environment – that Kanuti Gildi SAAL undoubtedly has – to feel like home. As I am a relatively (in the classical sense) visual artist by background, I relate to the performing arts more as a phenomenon than a medium of expression.
I am relatively site-specific in my practice and the nature of my activities. In spatial situations, I like to capture what is beyond the field of vision: atmosphere and impression - things whose constituent parts are debatable. (We know the well-known poets' maniacal desire for mapping sensations that are particularly impossible to map because their phenomenality lies in their ephemerality.)
I look for ways to draw visual parallels, to express a subjective experience of space, to play on a kind of collective nostalgia. Through what exists I try (and not just me myself, but arts in general) to refer to what does not exist. (Perhaps the difference between hallucination and art is who it is directed towards as an experience.)
Three large windows and candlesticks, all swaying. There are not enough candles for them. There's a lamp with an open dome with a copper body that sends a refracted red light across the room. Each of the wallpapers covers only half the room: the larger flowers are on the desk side of the room and the smaller ones on the bed side.
The house across the street is being demolished – the only one close in age to our house. It's dusty and full of cobwebs. The atmosphere is thick here, no memory of the smell.
Through feverish attempts to remember a place, all other places become meaningless and non-significant. You spend time in the spaces around you with heightened attention: Is this smell similar, if so, what else is similar, what else is here, how do you get out of this memory.
It seems as if I'm starting to remember the images. The current and the past are suddenly very similar.
The lobby on the second floor of Kanuti Gildi SAAL is extremely similar to my home in Prague. Shelf full of books with crumpled pages and a certain aura of shabbiness.
Somewhere there are some familiar blues and reds, but they may not even be the same. In fact, they may not even be blue and red.
The space I'm re-enacting doesn't exist. I mean, maybe it does exist, but you can't go there, and it's unlikely for it to be the same, and it's unlikely for it to be the way I remember it.
The power of experience lies in the places we have been, not in the fact that they exist. On stage, you can create a whole series of experiences that don't exist, but they are only validated through the places we have already experienced. The rest passes us by. New things are always made up of a n number of previous ones.
I get stuck at performativity. According to the Estonian Dictionary it's related to being staged, characteristic of it. Outside the context of the performing arts, however, it has the tone of a certain insincerity - of making something bigger, more grandiose, smaller, more epic, more garish, more sacred - of bringing something to life on a scale that might not otherwise be.
In theatre, it's easy enough to make such moves. The space does not argue with anything. On the contrary! Spaces that have been made clean, to make room for the undertones of each storyteller, above all, only resemble all the other spaces in which to tell a story. In a black box, almost anything you put in there automatically becomes a kind of object to be included. Because of the context, everything seems to have the slight value of being a prop.
My black box is about the size of a classroom. The trusses are just here and then two meters to the other side.
The window frames, which unlike the walls and window panes have been left white, catch attention.
There's a niche in the right wall, possibly where the door once was. It's waiting for something to fill it, for an empty vault in the wall to frame something.
