(Photos and video: Dorte Jelstrup)
I participated in the Sister’s Academy as visiting researcher and included this in my introduction to the semester as Head of Studies of the Performance Design Programme. The Head of Studies is substituted by a sister’s academy delegate. The performance situation formed part of a week of semesterstart where the students and professors visited Sister’s Academy, Malmø.
As Head of the Performance Design programme I substituted myself with another me: Silva, who formed part of my participation as visiting researcher in the immersive performance situation Sister’s Academy at Inkonst, Malmø.
Performative situation at Performance Design semester start Fall 2015
Sister’s Academy at Inkonst, Malmø
Here is a description of my participation in the immersive performance installation Sister’s Academy at Inkonst, Malmø:
Silva Savage at Sister’s Academy Boarding School
August 19, 2015
Meet Silva, a poetic animal in excess, a savage-in-the making.
In her suitcase she brings the feet and feathers of a butchered rooster. Around her wrist a bracelet hangs: spiky black plastic picked up on a North Sea beach, a polymere token transported via currents and drifts from fellow birds nesting in the Great Pacific Plastic Gyre.
What will she do for you, this Silva, this medium of the wild?
Silva is a relational intensity, a patchwork geography of words and phrases. Silva is a gathering, plastic organics, a collection of synthetics and ethics. Do you dare eat that Egg?
And below: my original letter of motivation.
May 8th, 2015. Firy Fern Studio, DK
To Sisters Hope. Letter of motivation: I thank you for this opportunity to further develop my Poetic Self and to explore it as Visiting Researcher at the Sisters Academy Boarding School at Inkonst. The project I would like to work with at the boarding school is an individual project called Animal in Excess, part 1: Meeting Silva, a poetic savage-in-the-making. In Latin Silva is a forest, a gathering of trees. Silva is also a collection of literary pieces or poems; a thesaurus of words or phrases. And Silva is etymologically related to the word savage: from Old French sauvage, and from Late Latin salvāticus, from Latin silvāticus, of the woods, wild, from silva, forest. My project is to engage myself as Silva, a savage and wildly making animal.
“She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire and, in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires…”
The cover text from philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s book: chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth, is also a manifesto for the creative metamorphosis that I hope to undergo during my stay at the Sisters Academy Boarding School. I want to challenge myself and see how far I dare go into the wild with my Poetic Savage Silva Self. I want to cross the threshold and fully embody art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire. I want to practice wild, sensuous and poetic modes of inquiry and knowledge production. With me I will bring Elizabeth Grosz and her heavyweight transformations of the wilderness of Deleuze, Darwin and Uexküll. And I will bring: Something Animal, a feather fountain pen, a boiled egg, and a journal in which I will monitor the project.
Bio: Connie Svabo, PhD, Associate Professor, Head of Studies in Performance Design, Roskilde University. For a full academic profile and list of publications see: http://rucforsk.ruc.dk/site/person/csvabo, for an incomplete and somewhat random gathering of experimental work see: http://hybridspaces.me
connie svabo 