Skrivorangeriet sommar: intensiv workshop online...
Blir av i sommar igen! Tre dagar i veckan fm och em ses vi i en hel månad för att riktigt utnyttja den underbara sommaren och den energi vi får då, med de långa ljusa nätterna eller sena vanorna och tiden som vi har, den utnyttjar vi såklart till det bästa som finns: att skriva, att upptäcka, att undersöka, att komma vidare, att ha en skrivrutin, att vara kreativ - och - att ha en community. Missa inte detta som jag haft online tre somrar i rad; i juli. Det kostar 5000 kr för en hel månad med mängder av undervisningstid och goda råd. claradiesen@gmail.com är min mail. Om du vill kan du anmäla dig redan nu.
Concert: Hybris Healers, Clara Diesen (text/reading), Dos Oké (dance/ritual), Miguel Angel Regalado (visuals/video)
At Reimersholme Hotel october 2020.
Photo: Anna Dvrnik
Strategies for solace - artist in residence at c.off in april 2020
https://www.coff.se/sv/strategies-for-solace-with-clara-diesen/ Read the interview about this project about actions and gestures for comfort.
Strategies for solace with Clara Diesen
“Poet, artist and creative director Clara Diesen was scheduled for a two-week residency in our studio to work on an artistic research project with the topic strategies for solace. However, a virus came in-between, and the residency was re-located outside (with our studio as a base for props and equipment). We asked Clara to tell us about the unfolding of the work, how her interest in gestures of comfort first started, and how the current situation has affected her research when social distancing re-negotiates our usual ways of communication.”
Photos: Clara Diesen
Dancer: Hanna Åhs
Maintenance of a memory
Art show in beautiful Österlen, Byagården i Gislöv. Drawings, objects and photos. A summer happening.
Art show in Johnson, VT: throwback. Fall20/Winter 2021
Object Theatre at MINEMA Gallery was an artshow with me and Renée Lauzon at my dear friends newly open gallery in the wonderful art town of Vermont, Johnson. I couldn’t be more grateful and happy to be represented by them. Michael and Kyle are the loveliest people and with exquisite taste and engagement for everything that has to do with art - and activism for a better society and world. I love them. My object theatre-art show was filled with drawings and modified objects. The art show is over, and not very many were able to see it live - but there are drawings and objects that are at sale on the gallery’s wonderful website, which is also excellent for just “window-shopping” and looking at art. https://www.minemagallery.com/clara-diesen
The poet´s questionnaire: answers
Suddenclarity company had a residency at Balettakademin and worked with a performance in two parts.
Part one: the poet’s questionaire.
Danced by Hanna Åhs.
Curator: Exhibition at Färgfabriken with the curator group Muskot
An introduction to the exhibition of the curator group Muskot
How do artistic practices change in pandemic existence? What can we learn from art here and now?
The curator group Muskot sent an open invitation to artists and poets to present their activities right now, to give examples of how the practical and psychological problems of isolation can be turned into an outward gesture.
In the large hall of Färgfabriken, works by 80 artists and 30 poets were displayed.
En introduktion till utställningen av curatorgruppen Muskot
Hur förändras konstnärliga praktiker i den pandemiska tillvaron? Vad kan vi lära av konsten här och nu?
Curatorgruppen Muskot skickade en öppen inbjudan till konstnärer och poeter att redovisa sin verksamhet just nu, att ge exempel på hur isoleringens praktiska och psykiska problem kan vändas i en utåtriktad gest.
I Färgfabrikens stora sal visas verk av 80 konstnärer och 30 poeter.
Part one: The poet’s questionnaire (danced)
From the online performance The poet’s questionnaire (danced). By Suddenclarity Company, June 2020
This is answer to two questions:
1. How do you communicate with a tree?
2. If there was love and it went away, does some of the love still remain?
Part one: The poet’s questionnaire - Thunder road
Danced by Hanna Åhs.
The answer is not in the question and yet it is.
What if someone was ready to answer you but without words?
The number of questions are a thousand.
Artist in residence at c.off Stockholm
Here you can read my interview as part of my artist in residence at c.off in april. We were outside due to the pandemic. https://www.coff.se/sv/strategies-for-solace-with-clara-diesen/
Found gestures: comfort
One of my ongoing practices has been performance or work for the stage, proceeded by an extensive inventory. This is a collaborative process of finding authentic expressions in fine detail, and then use only the details, basically. This has been a practice of mine since 1995 and is inspired by many different methods.
With Sanna, Lo och Hanna.
I feel like I have incorporated these methods and made them my own - as a process within the on-going work - where also my experience as a poet and working with text is a vital part. The theme in my present work is mainly about relationships between adults and children as a symbol for the world itself. I was also always interested in comfort. The gestures can be authentic or awkward, and our initial intention is the most interesting thing - what does intention tell us? Also, I’m interested in the act of seeing. Observing comes before language: seeing might be a language itself.
summerdress
Revisiting my old performances - I’m the worst when it comes to document my own work, but here is Summerdress, don’t even know some of the things we were doing, but it was so much fun: what can you do with a dress or in a dress and what not to do in a dress?
Dream
I also continued my ongoing ”method” in involving friends’ stories in my work. It gives a democratic value as only parts of it is in fact my own experiences. Other peoples stories blends in with my own.
This time I asked friends to share the dreams they have at night, dreams connected with fear. At first, I simply asked them to share their fears: as a child, and as a grown up.
I am fascinated by the Dreamcatcher; and by a lot of spiritual practices that serves as ritual to keep us sane, to keep us safe. Because I believe in rituals (they don’t have to be in a religious or even in a spiritual sense) I asked my friends and family to share their fears, so that I could transcribe them into my own dreamcatcher. And by doing so I promised them that the fear would also lighten up, maybe even dissolve.
In this work I also addressed my fascination with sleeping and dreaming. I suffered from a sleeping disorder called sleep paralysis when I was younger, and my son suffers from a common thing for children to experience called night terrors. I think of how the patterns in dreams repeats themselves and how fears are often manifested in them. Our deepest fears.
Again, the theme can be seen as the personal versus what is universal.
Our fears, we learn to live with them. To live with fears is to be courageous, it is part of the human experience to have them. But some of them are more paralysing than we know. Especially being afraid of one another. How we will be perceived, being judged.
That we are not worthy of love and affection. But we are.
That we are separated. But we are not.
Things we do, how we act in negative and destructive ways are often sprung out of fears. When we put them into words, perhaps they can dissolve. Just like the bad dreams caught in the web of the dreamcatcher will dissolve by the mornings’ first rays of light.
Conversation piece I
An interactive performance, that took place 11 of May 2019 at c.off . Ongoing artistic research/series of work
Conversation piece is a series of moderated conversations, an interactive performance, as a way of examining the conversation as an artform or ritual.
In my artistic research I want to examine personal stories from new angles; also, to examine a non-hierarchic way of communicating.
As a pocket of resistance against the system I called my conversation piece nr 1
The tiny refusal in dialogue with Herbert Marcuse, who wrote about what he stated was the Great Refusal. He argues that "advanced industrial society" creates false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought.
“This results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behaviour, in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour wither away. Against this prevailing climate, Marcuse promotes the “great refusal” (described at length in the book) as the only adequate opposition to all-encompassing methods of control. Much of the book is a defence of "negative thinking" as a disrupting force against the prevailing positivism. Marcuse strongly criticises consumerism and modern "industrial society", which he claims is a form of social control. Marcuse argues that while the system we live in may claim to be democratic, it is actually totalitarian. A form of technological rationality has imposed itself on every aspect of culture and public life, and has become hegemonic. Our identification with this hegemonic ideology of modern industrial society, this ideology does not represent a form of "false-conscious", but rather has succeeded in becoming reality.”
(summary from Wikipedia)
A description of the actual performance:
I create a score for the conversation. This is a thought-out way of making the participants feel as comfortable as possible. They don´t have to feel like they have to make a statement or an impression. The participants do not introduce themselves nor do they have to talk about private things or explain their profession. Nevertheless, it is a profound touching experience and very personal.
All is carefully prepared and moderated by the artist/poet.
The result of the first conversation piece took place at c.off in Stockholm in May 2019. There was deliberately no documentation from this session, and who was participating is forever a secret.
This is a continuous work and is planned to take place in a series of conversation as an ongoing research about communication and connection. It will increasingly be documented in photo and writing, and every conversation has a unique score, but it is the same concept. It is a conversation that is both hopefully deeply meaningful, a unique experience but at the same time it is l'art pour l'art – it’s a happening, and event, a performance made for the participants in it.
You are having a conversation, but you don’t get to or have to choose the subject. You are a listener and you are a performer without having to have any ambitions. How does this affect us as individuals? It’s liberating. We are not producing anything. We are not networking.
It is a tiny refusal.
Conversation piece II-III
The conversations will have the same concept but a slightly different score.
What we say is important, but it is spontaneous and not thought through. It has to exist within a framework, which paradoxically enough makes the individual freer.
You don’t have to prove yourself, we are all examining what comes out of our mouths when we speak without unconsciously trying to gain something or having to position ourselves in relation to other people, since we don’t know who they are, and we are all part of a piece of art; an unique experience, a real escape in the consumerism world.
Time I
TIME?
Time is meeting your own gaze in a real photo. Not the confetti of self portraits but to be seen by a photographer, the beloved, by time itself, the gaze now meeting my own asking.
How far from memory are you? We are made by memories, made up by them, but we are also made of all the things we forget.
SPACE?
As I write this, I’m creating space in a web of images and words, a fleeting moment beside others, a vague nostalgia beside your own nostalgia.
To be human is to try to make some space for yourself, but they will make you struggle for it. To be human is to have had space inside another human being. Amazing as that.
Then you will have to create space on your own. We were born into a system, a form. It is also a web of sorts. It’s called capitalism and patriarchy and to escape, look at all the things you are told by society that simply is not true.
Motherhood for instance. They say you can’t be an artist and a mother. But what if that’s what you are and to be a mother means to still be yourself only the child turned the world raw again.
To create space might be to say that life is a form of art, and you can resist the system simply by not believing the story. I’m creating space with my own vulnerability and it is uncomfortable, but we don’t grow without.
We are among trees. The trees don’t make us feel ashamed. We are in the gaps between birches and light.
I’m a single mother, and I have been working five different jobs (I’m actually not exaggerating) to put food on the table, but also to maintain writing poetry and do some of my art, trying to be so many different things only to realize I have to be ONE thing, in everything I do: my own authentic self, the poet. The artist. I will not divide myself. Everything is whole. Maintenance art. The spiritual art. For humans who need to twist their soul a bit.
Examination, part 1
I revisited what I did when I worked with theatre, it’s been over ten years, since then I realised it was not theatre I did. I was in some sort of conflict with the genre, but unwillingly, I just wanted to do what I wanted to do, I wasn’t trying to do something new with theatre as form per se - that never occurred to me.
I just do the same things I always do with some variations, as those familiar with my work for the stage can see in these pictures. So I am doing the same kind of work but I am re-framing it as simply ART, art for the stage or performance art. In this context,I am free to work with authencity rather than story. With starting points very different from theatre, and above all, free from genre-thinking.
With these magical performers in addition of my daughter I did a piece called ATLAS. It is about the relationship between grown-ups and children and about love in the anthropocene. I am so grateful for this education, at Uniarts, a one year program for professional artists, dancers, actors, writers. I’m reconnecting. It’s crystal clear.
Life/Work: Work from the present and the past, as well as new texts, reflections and recurrent themes.
To listen to some of my texts in Tankar för dagen (Thoughts of the day) on Sveriges Radio, find episodes here >>