EMBODIMENT / CPF: Performance Suzanne Walsh

Capture Performance Focus IRELAND
curated by Helen Carey

Copyright:
Suzanne Walsh
VFK- Schleife 18, galerie michaela stock www.galerie-stock.net
Video: goes:art, Audiovisueller Mediendienst & Broadcast-TV

Performance documentation:
Suzanne Walsh: The Land Where Nothing Is

The work I'm showing in Embodiment is an example of how I feel text can reach outside its given parameters: here I'm merging poetry from the early 20th century with online comments from current activist groups to create new poetic propositions. The original poetry is by a revolutionary involved in the 1916 uprising in Ireland, Thomas McDonagh, and another poetic ally, Francis Ledwidge. Both wrote in a romantic style, often evoking natural forces. The comments come from Facebook groups critiquing how we treat those left outside the current political system today: wildlife, the homeless, those who don't square with the neoliberal dream. This work, called The Land Where Nothing Is, also includes the sound of the bittern, a bird that is linked to McDonagh but now extinct in Ireland, this is present as a 'missing voice' in our society. Birds often find their way into my work.

For me text is not always 'about', it is also a force itself, pulling you into worlds. While traveling to Vienna I decided to immerse myself in Freud, someone I haven't read in a while. One day I take time out from our busy program to visit the Freud Museum. This is currently under renovation, but I still see some exhibits in its temporary quarters. I'm drawn in particular to the little antique figurines he collected, one is an unspecified animal from the 5th century, worn but still potent. I go to the little reading room of the Freud shop and read further, on his thoughts on totemism.
Later I visit the cafe where he used to write and I write too, a little, over the clatter of dishes, many lamps above my head. I'm thinking about how my dreams seem to all be about invasion or exile lately, and can you choose exile from yourself? I think about the 'too muchness' of self. It's too hot and loud here though, so perhaps these thoughts are not to be regarded at all.

I leave and wander through an orderly rose garden nearby. I see an ornate building built in the form of a Greek temple and wonder, should I go inside? if I were in a dream, I would, I think. The sign tells me it is the 'Theseus Temple' and houses contemporary art. I see pigeons perched up inside and think I will say hello to them, at least.
There seems to be no art, that I can see. The pigeons are unmoving, unnaturally still, which concerns me. This is because they are not alive. These taxidermied pigeons are the artwork: Turisti by Maurizio Cattelan.
Back in galerie michaela stock , I perform my texts, let them possess me, their many sources becoming one, voice being both part of the body and exiting it, simultaneously. 'Soul animals, such as birds...are ideally suited by their flight through the air... qualities prompting surprise and fear, to be recognized as the bearer of the soul as it leaves the body'. (Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia).

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