LET US BE THE SECOND BODY
The degree project of Cilia Herrmann; DU 21
I DO BELIEVE THAT WE ARE ALREADY READY FOR CHANGE. I DON’T BELIEVE THAT CHANGE IS INTRINSICALLY GOOD. I DO BELIEVE THAT WE MUST BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE.
I DON’T BELIEVE THAT WE KNOW WHITCH CHANGE IT IS THAT WE WANT TO SEE.
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It is dark, I am surrounded by textile. I know the goal is to move through those textiles, get out of them, get to clarity, out to the air. There are some soft-sweaters, trousers, self-made socks, a pink onesie, a scarf that smells after a skull that hasn’t been washed for a while. Moving through, moving inside: the borders between the here and there, the up and down vanish. It is consuming to move. I decide to stay for a while. What if I don’t get through this pile, what if I stick with it?! I like the heaviness that is supporting me. Carrying, caring for stuff, that is so different. In the darkness I cannot see. I can smell thought, sense, feel. Of course, I feel myself as a single unit, existing besides those textiles. I never asked for it though. Longing to resolve into a soft fabric of weight and warmth. Maybe if I give up the goal of moving through, that will happen.
-fake memories of a childhood game, played on a birthday-party: Every child throws some cloths plus the whole wardrobe of the parents on a pile; then one child enters the pile and moves through it
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My work is about realizing interdependencies. I imagine it to be like crawling through a compost-pile.1 This text is a compost pile. Build out of layers. I honestly just throw different things, in different times on this pile. I can’t separate them anymore. I can’t separate important from unimportant. I can’t separate in order to build a red thread. This text is just different parts being next to each other. Sometimes bullshit with still some recognizable sludge, sometimes an apple core, the pulp already eaten, sometimes a kernel, that couldn’t be digested. I hope with time, they will resolve into
nurturing soil. That of course can only happen in interdependency, in existing next to each other. In a compost pile. Those bits and pieces existing in this text are just small parts, never the whole. Trough writing there is happening a digesting. I put everything on a pile and then sometimes I turn the pile around. Ideas, thoughts, memories shift-change inside me, resolve, in a constant process. It is the condition of this compost pile that it is mixed up, dirty, honest in its mess, blurry and distorted in the process of changing.
You are invited to join and get muddy, and yes, if you jump into it, and wonder inside there is the chance you also get mixed up.
To help you navigate through my compost pile I colored different layers differently:
(no stress to remember the colors but rather a help to come back to, if you wonder from witch angel I am writing)
lingering in line with lustrous lightings (some thoughts of mine) Wandering with witnesses (talking with strangers on the street)
Awkward addled accompany (added guide for the audience (aka you/the reader) Blurry-Believes /Pretend-Poems /Slippery-Statements
Swollen-Self-Stories (my personal references)
Rotating round relating reliance (references to others)
And yes of course this layers/colors are about to get messed up, and are in-between. How can they not, in a compost-pile?
--- --- ---- - --- --- - - --- --- --- So let´s start, wait strange, how can I start in a compost-pile? We already started!
1 The term of a compost-pile is cruising around at the moment, I stumbled over it in Donna Harraways book;
Staying with the Trouble; then also in a talk with Antonija Livingstone, where she was telling about her garden project, and the compost that is existing in it. My strongest physical relation to a compost pile is the one in my grandmas garden. Pumpkins are growing on it.
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I will and I will not change the world with this text and with this project. I will because I believe in interdependency and I believe that the world is in constant change, so am I. We are in intra-actions2, so in my acting, in my writing of course I do change the world. I am just writing I will not, in order to put away some pressure beforehand. Some pressure that could easily end up in paralysis. Maybe it is a more healthy approach; to believe that you will not make any change.
However, that is also the problem, why I struggle so much, within the frame of thinking dance, thinking art political. (Which I am aiming for in this project; I am searching for political movement.) I think we live in a democratic market-economy where everything is kind of telling all the time you will not make any change. You are not the one able to make the big changes. There are happening somewhere else, in the money, in the big industries and then a bit also in some parliaments, by some politicians that we vote for.
Change seems (to me!) abstract and far away, kind of unreachable: The tool of traditional
parliamentary policy, seems (to me!) nowadays not efficient and unable.3 The tool of the economic market seems (to me!) able and efficient but unjust.
So, what is a tool (for me!)4 to bring about change that is both able and just?
“I ask this question because, at both a political and an economic level, the facts of global interdependency are denied. Or they are exploited.”5
“An egalitarian imaginary is required for such a struggle--one that reckons with the potential for destruction in every living bond. Violence against the other is, in this sense, violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.”6
I DO BELIEVE THAT I CAN NOT BE OUT OF VIOLENCE UNTIL THE WORLD IS. I DO BELIEVE THAT I SUFFER FROM AND AM THE CAUSE FOR THIS VIOLENCE. I DON’T BELIEVE THAT I ALONE CAN CHANGE THIS VIOLENCE. I DO BELIEVE THAT IN RELATION WITH OTHERS I CAN. I DO BELIEVE THAT THERE IS A SYSTEM BEHIND VIOLENCE. I DO BELIEVE THAT I BOTH SUFFER FROM AND AM THE CAUSE FOR THIS SYSTEM. I DON’T BELIEVE THAT I ALONE CAN CHANGE THIS SYSTEM. I DO BELIEVE THAT IN RELATION WITH OTHERS I CAN.
2 A term that Karen Barad is introducing in Meeting the Universe Halfway
3 Out of the necessity of being reelected/ making a career in your party. One example in Germany: a forest is
killed at the moment, because of a highway in a federal law where our “environmental party” is in power. A party that evolved from environmentalism made in the street, now institutionalized in a parliament, can no longer stand for their values.
4 I am searching for tools/answers/insights for myself; out of a struggle arising in myself. But/ and thinking/knowing/hoping that other people may relate to that.
5 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020), 43
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I DO BELIEVE THAT THOSE PEOPLE INCLUDE ME AND YOU. I BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT ARE MORE RESPONS-ABLE THAN ME AND YOU. I DO BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE THAT ARE LESS RESPONS-ABLE THAT ME AND YOU. I DO BELIEVE THAT RESPONS-ABILITY IS DETERMINED BY POWER. I DO BELIEVE THAT YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE POWER YOU HAVE. I DO BELIEVE THAT I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THE POWER I HAVE. “”Vulnerability “ should not be considered as a subjective state, but rather as a feature of our shared interdepended lives. (…) One is vulnerable to the social structure upon which one depends, so if the structure fails, one is exposed to precarious condition”7
And I am the one supporting a system/ structure, that is build for some to fail, and for some to not. I outsource my vulnerability to others.
“The dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.” 8
This quote by Ta-Nehisi Coates was staying with me throughout the process. And that bought me to the wish to not outsource my struggles anymore, but to take them to me. To learn how to struggle myself. And for me that needs to start with a realization of the struggles that I am outsourcing. With realizing my interdependencies. But how?
LET US BE THE SECOND BODY A request that is both meant to the us and to the not-us. Come on, let us be the second body and Please, could you let us be the second body.
The term second body came to me through an essay by Daisy Hildyard
In The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard presents an updated dualism between the animal bodies in which we eat, breathe, and sleep and the virtual bodies of our global connections and environmental impacts.9
Second body is a term, for me, to address the outsourcing of our struggles that we in capitalist, industrial developed states do. We leaf traces all over the world, we have second bodies all over the world.
7 Butler, The Force of Nonviolence, 45-6
8 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel& Grau, 2015)
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I know that I live in a system that is build up on outsourcing of struggle10. I know that I am outsourcing my struggles. I know about effects, which cause I am. I am supporting a systemic violence. A violence I don’t want to support. And still I keep on existing in that system. Strange isn’t it? Strange, weird, weird!
I am responsible but somehow not response-able.
A sentence Hooman Sharifi11 said to me: If I take them seriously, they need to take themselves
seriously.
And I add another one of him: “Art equals politics. (…) Politics is social awareness.”12
Through the interviews I had (later on you will read more around them) I realized that a lot of people think politics outside of themselves. Politics is happening somewhere else, in another community, not in ours. Being a politician is just a job that one can have, quite stiff, and somehow boring, not alive, not real life.
We don’t take ourselves serious as political beings, but we are also not being taken seriously as such.
Quite a statement, and I don’t see it that harshly pointed.
What if we can shift if around: take ourselves seriously, so we will be taken seriously. We need to change our comprehension of what politics is. Politics is not just happening in parliaments. We can bring politics everywhere. Let’s bring it to the street. Let us be the second body.
What if they shift it round: they take us seriously, so we need to take ourselves seriously. There are beautiful examples out there showing how more direct citizens-participation can enrich politics.13 Let our political system be build up so we can decide. (Not some businesses). And no, I definitely don’t want to line myself up in the lines of people complaining about our politicians today, and I am aware how much work democracy is. But let us take that work, let us take that struggle, let us be the second body. Let our political system be build up so we can really struggle with politics.
So, it is all about demanding but/and also taking the space where we can struggle with our problems/ be political/ be the second body. In the end, taking and demanding is the same, because there is no we and they. There is no us and no not-us. There is no Come on, let us be the second body and Please, could you let us be the second body. Both melt together in Let us be the second body.
10 What do I mean? With the rise of Capitalism first struggles got outsourced through the oppression of the
working class and the women, who were producing the working-force. Then the outsourcing continued through benefitting of slavery and colonialism, the exploitation of BPoCs. Ah wait forgot: Nowadays we know that we are outsourcing our struggles to the future generation. Or to other humans, other species and landscapes, that we are co-existing with and dying.
11 Sharifi is an Oslo-based choreographer and founder of the Impure company
12Hooman Sharifi, Artist Artistic Objective (2003) published in: Dance, Documents of Contemporary Art; edited
by André Lepecki, (MIT Press, 2011)
13 Here is the link to one example of a citizens-assembly in Ireland:
https://us.boell.org/en/irish-citizens-assembly#:~:text=On%20May%2025%2C%202018%2C%20the%20Republic%20of%20Ireland,citizens%20to%20 debate%20the%20issues%20of%20the%20day.
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I guess what you just read is bullshit, here my explanation:
Of course, there is a we and a they in our society. The dichotomies of the we/they the here/there exist. Even if the borders would be blurry. But there are clear borders. And people who are inside and outside.14 We are including/excluding (there is no one without the other). Who is this we, who in this they. Where is the here and the there. Right now, I am just using, without being specific.
I am longing to dissolve those dichotomies, through realizing interdependencies. Then we can take the responsibility, coming with this realization.
--- --- --- --- - -- ---- - - - --- --- Another starting point:
During this process I realized that my job is a lot about listening. What I am wondering now, is my role in this text-writing, in this product15. In the interviewing, that I did for the project,
it was all about conversation. I was not the author of the conversation (how can I?), rather the initiator16. Now I actually am the author of a text, the text that is mostly capturing my
relationship with and to others, my interdependency. But/and I am writing this text on my own17. Strange. How can I still listen while being on my own? How can I find a compost pile
in myself? How can I be not a singular person but one that is made out of many?18 How can I
be a singular many? How can I acknowledge that I don’t have only one body but a second19,
and many?
My project at the moment is to talk with strangers on the street. First, I called it
interviewing, that kind of sounded more sophisticated and suiting the academical context that I am in (doing my Bachelor degree project in dance at SKH). But by now I realized that that’s really not the right term to describe what I am doing. I guess it is more something like being a listener to whatever comes up. There is no determination from my side. I am not forming the space. I am just bringing it into existence and then holding it, holding the space. Wherever it goes it goes. The length of it might be determined by riding the Roslagsbanan to the stop the first person in the conversation needs to get off. Or it goes on until one fall asleep in McDonalds.
14 And people dying day by day because of them.
15 Here I see a parallel also to my product, which I will present physically
16 This is how Tania Bruguera, a political motivated performance artist defines herself; a definition I can totally identify with
17 And I will perform on my own
18 This idea finds its roots a postcard I found on a toilet in Cologne: Wir sind Viele, jede*r Einzelne von uns (We are many, each of us) a postcard made by a movement going on in Germany standing for diversity in the arts
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Coming from an ass-shaking-session with Mariê, I am walking down Brinellvägen thinking about the degree project. The time I already spend with it ended in despair, not knowing where to go, what makes sense to do, where to start. What I knew was that I needed to start, to get going in order to not get stuck in this despair. Starting off, not exactly knowing where to go.
Starting in the concrete. In the concrete of an encounter. In the concrete of a conversation. Breathing in, breathing out trying to convince myself to go and talk to a person. I walk up the stairs to the Roslagsbanan. Waiting for the train to arrive, I am watching the people standing at the platform. I am sacred, arrgh, super weird to just go to a stranger and ask them to have an interview (aka just a conversation). What is the justification? And yes, in theory, I find it super important and interesting to break with the strangeness and silence in public spaces. But actually, standing there just feels unnatural. Weird, strange, okay just get you shit together and ask someone, don’t care. But I do care. And I still care too much when the Roslagsbanan arrives. I am entering it. Entering as the last one. Then walking down the rows, super slowly, scanning everyone, smiling helpless to persons, and then shyly looking away when the other person smiles back. “Don’t act that weird” I am telling me, “the next seat you are just going to sit down and talk. Talk something, just dare to.” But then everyone seemed so absorbed by their phones. Frustrated with me I am reaching the last row, and the door. But then there it is, a last hope, that came so unexpected that I clinched on to it. A man, probably around 80, not having a phone in his hand, but merely watching out of the window.
“Forlot, pratar du engelska?” “Yes, I do”
“Ah nice! I am studying dance, and need to do a project, and I decided to interview people, and I just wanted to ask you if it would be okay for you to be interviewed, I mean by me, I mean: Could I interview you”
All that came out in a stumbling stream, but after he didn’t look too confused and answered with a Yes, I dared to breath in again. Knowing that I can speak, and more important
knowing that I can listen: relaxedness started to spread in my body.
From then on it was all about giving the right smile at the right moment, and then sometimes dropping a question in.
Klapperstab2021
After the talk I was relief, relief that I started, that I got into the going, but being even more confused with what my project is around. Figuring out, there actually weren’t any questions I
20 Every time the term Klapperstab appears, you’ll find drawings attached in the appendix, that are a
visualization of the interview/talk I had. I am not capturing our talks here, because I am not interested in the content but in the act of it. (Of course, the act wouldn’t be there without the content.)
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want to ask, but that it was merely about the being in conversation; I was unglued. Maybe
with time it will makes sense by itself.
There is this wonderful children book by Michael Ende, it is called “Momo”22. Momo is a
small girl living alone. And her superpower is listening. She listens and problems dissolve. It is not that differences vanish, but that they become embraced. I always wanted to be like her. She is a beautiful example of changing the world, being a heroine by not actively doing something. But by existing, by living attentively. She doesn’t listen in order to. She listens. She knows the people that she is surrounded by and through being with the people, listening to her environment attentively, she notices change. She notices oppression and then,
through her knowledge from within, she is able to organize resistance from within.
Having classes with Fabian Barba23 I got introduced to the term of callejera, the streetwalker. A term María Lugones is using in her book, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes : Theorizing Coalition
Against Multiple Oppressions24. She uses it, in order to show how knowledge can be created from the street, from within the concrete. Momo is a callejera. Hanging out with the people, and getting so much wisdom, so much tactic (not stategie)25 from it. I want to be
a callejera too.
I didn’t become one jet, but I meet one, who is a callejera.
It was the day after I had the first encounter on the Roslagsbanan. Still being confused, but now being in it, being in some kind of process. I directly talked to a person I saw standing at Gullmarsplan, waiting for the same bus I needed to take.
He was open to have an interview with me. Then he explained that he thinks it’s great that I am interviewing people on the street. “But this is not the work.” he said. “The actual work needs to happen afterwards, inside of you.” I need to digest afterwards: to think what I want to take and what not. I need to put myself in relation to what has been said. Now in our conversation, there was not only my quest for a conversation at stake but also his quest for me to digest the conversation afterwards. I started the recording:
Klapperstab26
I stopped it in a McDonalds, in order to go and order some food. Going out of our
conversation, all of those realizations kicked suddenly in. Before, they were obscured by the concentration that went into talking. It was already around 10 and our talk had been going
22 Michael Ende, Momo, (Thienemannverlag, 1973)
23 Fabian Barba, a dancer and theorist who is specially interested in black feminist theory
24 Mariá Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, (Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 2003)
25 for María Lugones the differentiation between tactics and strategie is quite important. Tactics comes from
within, strategie is made from the outside. Refering to her there often goes a hierachy hand in hand with the creation of strategie or tactics. The norm is saying that tactics is less valuable because it comes unreflected out of affect. Lugones says that there is a lot of knowledge that is only accessible from within.
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on for a while. Transferring us from the bus to a rainy street, then searching for shelter in a McDonalds. At 12 in the night, out of tiredness, I wanted to go home. He is homeless. We went outside, back into the rain. Standing at the bus station arranging that we will meet each other again; next Monday at six in the library at Odenplan.
Sitting in the bus I realized how exhausted I was from only spending some hours, in a place that I didn’t know, with a person that I didn’t know. And was thinking how exhausting it must be to spend days, weeks, months and years like this. But then wondering if I am looking from my narrow perspective. Maybe the unknown becomes the norm in a while. Maybe you find stableness in the unstable.
Realizing only when we meet the next time that the reality is different: Next Monday, waking up I wondered how the day would go. Going to the library already at five, I was convinced that he wouldn’t show up. I got so distanced, from our last meeting, that our encounter was existing in a different reality to me. It felt like a trace of happening that already escaped the concreate.
Grapping the German newspaper and hiding me in a corner behind a staircase, I got lost in some articles. But my hand wandered constantly to my pocket, taking out my phone, looking at the time. Not really seeing it until it was four minutes before six. Then, standing up in order to just have a look at the entrance, didn’t expecting him to be there. And he wasn’t. At least I didn’t see him. Half relieved, half crestfallen I went to my spot to read. I was quite exhausted so looking forward to be home, but then I wanted to see him. And I was wondering if I would ever see him again. Knowing that he is spending time in the
surrounding of Gullmarsplan but me normally not spending time there. Strange so that was it. That was our short crossings of paths. One night in McDonalds. Strange enough that it actually was one night in McDonalds, arising from asking a stranger for an interview. I stood up and walked to the exit. Already out I saw him sitting in a chair. Reading nothing but waiting for me. He also saw me and waved.
Klapperstab27
After this evening, I realize you don’t make yourself stable in the unstable as a homeless person. But there exists actually stability, that you build yourself up. There are places that are getting known for you, there are people that you know. There is a home you build yourself up. The only difference to my known common places is that they are public, so with less28 barriers for people to enter. My life is mostly going on in the private or in the frames
of institution, with a lot of barriers, especially in those times29.
27 See appendix page 20
28 Still tremendous for some people, for example if you don’t have an EU-passport
29 2020 the year of Corona, where only students and staff have access to the building, exceptions can be made
with a risk assessment, which I guess wouldn’t include a homeless person. I admit that I haven’t pushed for it/tried it out though.
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And isn’t that exactly what I want, to minimize the barriers of my life in order to pop my bubble and realize my interdependencies?!
When I was telling Josefine Wikström in a supervision about this encounter and my wish of engaging more, she said that she was skeptical, if I/We would manage in a short time (I had around 7 more weeks to go) to find a non-hierarchical way of collaborating. My first reaction was that I believed that it would be too easy to drop the difficulties. That it was important to, and even my task to try.
A description and analyses of my relation to McDonalds: As a child McDonalds was the place me and my siblings were looking forward to go when having long car rides. We always shouted loudly in the backseats: “Wir wollen zu Maaaaces” Seldom my parents gave in. Always dropping comments on the damnability of the restaurant to the golden seagull, as they called it disprizingly. Afterwards came the time that my moral believes banned McDonalds from my desires too. So, sitting this evening in McDonalds felt like a zoo visit. Passing always a McDonalds while walking home, I kept wondering about this feeling of estrangement and otherness. Some shocking realizations came to me: Who do I perceive then as the animals, as the other, as the one to watch that is so different from me? Who am I alienating, exoticising? One time I got so curious that I stopped on my way home, ordered fries and watched the persons hanging out in McDonalds. Not a lot of persons where sitting there. So, I looked at the staff; without exception BPoCs. I was then wondering, who is in the need of working at McDonalds. With the moralization of what is good and bad, I did not only ban a big company out of my environment but also a lot of people. I opposed me to them. It may seem for some readers, strange to have such a long note about my relationship to McDonalds; but I think it is quite symbolic for how, moralization, standing for values can turn into violence. Who has the privilege to moralize, to abandon McDonalds? Who has the privilege to abandon several groups?
Another side story:
My father is an architect and was planning a housing estate for refugees in Germany. He wanted to build a soccer and basketball pitch. That was rejected with the argument that the children should go and play with other kids in their space. A clear direction of integration, they should come to us not we to them. Not realizing, that through that rejection, the they and we, the here and there only got reinforced. In my opinion, the logic of one-sided integration should, in sake of a non-violent living together, be broken and turned into inclusion. An inclusion, where an invitation (to play) can happen from both sides, so that with time the sides dissolve.
Then I was thinking, maybe Josefine is right. Maybe it is too complex trying to include another person in my project. Maybe I should start off with me. Maybe I need to learn how to struggle on my own, before I am asking another person helping me struggle.
Now, there is a constant struggle in myself between wanting to include who is excluded (in my bubble-world); but only getting more aware of all off the difficulties that goes with it. It feels like more and more power-structures unravel while I am going. Inclusion is something slippery. Inclusion cannot happen without exclusion?! I think a lot of value lies in “just” listening and not wanting anything from it, or expecting it to be something. Like Momo does.
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YOU ARE MY SECOND BODY AND I AM SORRY BUT ISN’T BEING SORRY JUST ANOTHER PART OF HIRACHY
BEING SORRY FOR THE LIFE YOU HAVE BECAUSE OF ME BECAUSE OF MY ANCESTORS YOUR LIFE I KNOW SO LITTLE ABOUT BEING SORRY OUT OF ASSUMPTIONS BEING SORRY IS THE LAST STEP TO OPRESSION THAT IS WHAT I THINK TAKING RESPONS ABILITY
FOR WHAT I DO FOR WHAT WE WHERE DOING IS SOMETHING ELSE SOMETHING ELSE THAN BEING SORRY
YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE WE WHERE THERE I AM HERE BECAUSE YOU ARE THERE YOU WILL BE THERE BECAUSE I AM HERE BUT INSTEAD OF BEING SORRY FOR THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE I COULD WORK ON DEWORKING THE BORDERS BETWEEN THE HERE AND THERE LEAVE MY HERE AND GET SOME KNOWLEDGE OF YOUR THERE AND YES, I GUESS THAT STARTS WITH A SORRY WITH A RECOGNITION OF THE HIRACHY
But coming back to the concreate: I did some more interviews, now starting off with a question: “What is a political movement for you?” From the realization, that people get scared from this broad, big question that they can’t relate to, I noticed that I need to build up an easy conversation first. An
icebreaker that gat’s people into talking and then they also they have some time to build up a connection to me. So, I decided to first ask them: “Do you have a connection to dance?” A question that brings a lot of people into generous talking. Then when I bring in the question “Do you have a connection to politics?” it doesn’t feel like an attack. Afterwards I want to ask if they see any relation between dance and politics, what then brings me to the “big” question: “What is a political movement for you?”
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I returned the same evening back to interviewing in the Roslagsbanan and tested out how the new question would function.
An interview that then in the end also ended in a conversation anyway. She could easily relate to the first question on dance, and as I imagined that made it easier for her to slip into the harder question on politics. She could relate to what I was talking about, although she said that she is a normal person and isn’t interested in politics.
Klapperstab30
Our conversation ended with us getting off at the same station, and then walking with a goodbye in opposite directions. After this talk, that was extremely warm and heartily I was walking home thinking that there maybe is a sense in the work I am doing. Hopefully and filled with positive energy I realized that that day definitely showed to me was that I am immensely affected by the talks I have, immensely influenced (in my feelings, thoughts, etc.) by the encounters. Noticing also that it wasn’t so much about me that determined my feelings and thoughts, and it wasn’t so much about the other person, but it was exactly the in between that formed them.
What I could not say is how the persons I interviewed felt after or inside the interview, I didn’t know if they were walking afterwards still thinking, still feeling the conversation we just had.
But I know that from the inside, from within the moment it changed them, for a while. That thing we created in between us.
Maybe it, the sense, doesn’t lay in the outside, you can’t even really perceive it from there. But in the inside in the encounter, in the one to one talking and connecting. Being clearly in a interdependency, just for a moment. Being in an interdependency in order to create, create a togetherness, an exchange a talk.
Maybe real realizations can only happen in the concreate of an encounter; being next to each other.
“Without that overarching sense of the interrelational, we take the bodily boundary to be the end rather than the threshold of the person, the site of passage and porosity, the
evidence of an openness to alterity that is definitional of the body itself. The threshold of the body, the body as threshold, undermines the idea of the body as a unit”31
This brought me to think of interdependency that I see in the klapperstabs.
Klapperstab is something unstable, balancing on bones, visibly standing but the falling is always there.
30 See appendix page 21
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A Klapperstab does not exactly know where it ends, but it can expand. It feels itself in relation. So, the boundaries of the own body get blurry. That makes it possible for it to get distorted, to expand. It expands in relations. Whatever those relation may be. Maybe in relation to other body parts within one Klapperstab, maybe in relation to other Klapperstabs.
A klapperstab doesn’t exists without encounters. A klapperstab is dependend. Maybe more interdependend.32
At the one hand I feel like my descriptions of the Klapperstabs sound quite unhealthy: being
dependent on encounters, not being able to exist on its own. Adapting/expanding/ getting distorted in encounters, in relation.
And then, on the other hand, I think that this is actually how our world is functioning, in intermeshed relations and not clearly defined boundaries between bodies. Coming to the thought of having second bodies.33 I am breathing out air, that a tree breathes in, and you are breathing that exact air. You are moving, and I (my mirror neurons) copy, adapt, import your movement and it gets imprinted on me. My boundaries of movement shift, I expand/adapt and distort my knowledge of movement.
Isn’t it rather a unhealthy thought of western-patriachal-society, that you exist on your own. That you perceive your body as an entity that is fixed. That you exist, because you are not the other.
Independency is worth striving for. It is the (American) Dream. It’s all about finding yourself, your own identity. As a woman, it is important to get indepentend, standing on your own legs. And yes, a we should not be dependent on one person, especially if this relation is forced on weird power-relations. But/and: You are dependent to a lot of people. You are interdependent. This realization is a tool to freedom. I think understanding our interdependency is a key point for a healing world. Understanding that we are intermeshed, understanding that we are impacted by the world and we have an impact on the world. Whether we like it or not.
“What each depends upon, and what depends upon each one, is varied, since it is not just other human lives, but other sensate creatures, environments and infrastructures: we depend upon them, and they depend upon us, in turn, to sustain a livable world.”34
So maybe my project makes sense, as a step for myself, to expand the knowledge of my interdependency outside of those in my bubble.35
So back into the project, back into the work, the concreate:
32 A try of descibing the klapperstabs I made on the 10/11/2020
33 A thought that is coming from the book The second body; Daisy Hildeyard
34 Butler, The Force of Nonviolence, 16
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One morning, sitting in the Roslagsbanan on my way to school I was facing a men that seemed to be in a lot of thoughts, staring out the window. Not being busy with a phone or anything. I got curious and decided to try coming into a conversation with him.
“Forlat, pratar du engelska?” “Nej, men svenska.” 36
Ufff, dame it, I was thinking, and cursing my bad Swedish. Whatever, I will give it a try. And tried to explain why I spoke to him, in a mix of Swedish and sign language.
“Jag studerar dans, och jag vill interviewer människor i Roslagsbanan.”
He didn’t really get what I was doing or trying, but he got that I was trying to start a conversation. And it seemed like he was also interested in it. At least he continued to speak:
He was telling me then that he was on his way to a språkkurs av SFI. That he was living here, 5 år och kommer från Afghanistan.
I told him, that I kommer från Tyskland, och bor i Sverige since 2 år.
Min son studera i Tyskland. Then he was showing me a lot of photos of him and his son in different places in Germany. Hon bode in Köln.
I got excited, because I am coming from and recently missing Cologne quite a lot.
I don’t know if I was able to communicate that through my broken Swedish (with consists mostly of trying to make German and English sound Swedish), my arm gestures and my face expression. But he was calling his son, saying att hon pratar jättebra tyska. Speaking shortly with his son in a language I didn’t understand.37Then he handed his phone over to me.
We spoke a bit in German, both of us being rather puzzled about the situation. I was smiling broadly; not only from the inside, what an absurd, funny situation it must be to suddenly get a phone call from your father and then, speaking with a complete stranger at the phone about nothing. Then saying: “Heydo. Trävlig att träffas!” to his father. “Ja, Dankeschön” from his side. I was walking to school wondering:
We weren’t talking at all about neither dance nor politics, it wasn’t circulating around my project, but still for me I felt the most, in comparison to the other conversations I had, being part of a political movement. It felt like we were on equal terms in the conversation.
I realized that it doesn’t matter if you speak about politics or not. But that what we are doing is always a political movement. Ahh, conversations with strangers, maybe conversations in general but conversation and getting to know your interdependency is always a political movement.
36 This means: Sorry, do you speak English? No, but Swedish. I am not going to translate the other small
misspelled and unproper Swedish I am using in this text.
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Because it is a heterogenous conversation, trying to engage with the otherness of the other person, and by this also discover similarities.
And/But the similarities are at the moment on my term, he is engaging in my background, and has connections to it (his son). I am not able in engage with his background, doesn’t even know the languages that are spoken is his country, and was shy/embarrassed to ask where he is exactly coming from because I was even unsure if I was right that Kabul is the capitol. Now I feel stupid for not just asking, being honest about my ignorance38, that comes with the Middle-Europe-centricity that I grew up with. Asking and trying to connect, trying to understand, engaging with my ignorance. I guess this is another political movement: To engage with your ignorance.
And voilà, a weird ending that is quite abrupt:
I DO BELIEVE IN INTERDEPENDENCY. I DON’T BELIEVE IN DEPENDENCY. I DO BELIEVE IN CHANGE. I DON’T BELIEVE IN SOLUTIONS. I DO BELIEVE IN ACTING LIKE THERE ARE SOME SOLUTIONS. I DO BELIEVE IN STRUGGELING, IN DANCING. I DO BELIEVE THAT IT MATTERS WHAT I DO. EVEN MORE I DO BELIEVE THAT IT MATTERS WHAT I DON’T DO. I DO BELIEVE THAT I MATTER. AND YES, ONLY IN CONNECTION WITH OTHER, IN INTERDEPENDENCY. I DO BELIEVE THAT I AM A MATTER MADE OUT OF INTERDEPENDENCY. I DO BELIEVE IN COMPOSITION. I DON’T BELIEVE IN OPPOSITION. I DO BELIEVE IN RESISTANCE. I DO BELIEVE IN USING WHAT IS THERE. I DO BELIEVE IN THINKING OF WHAT IS NOT THERE. I DO BELIEVE THAT WE ARE ALREADY READY FOR CHANGE. I DON’T BELIEVE THAT CHANGE IS INTRINSICALLY GOOD. I DO BELIEVE THAT WE MUST BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE.39
I DON’T BELIEVE THAT WE ALWAYS KNOW WHITCH CHANGE IT IS THAT WE WANT TO SEE. I DO BELIEVE THAT REALIZING YOUR INTERDEPENDENCIES IS A WAY TO FIGURE THAT OUT.
38 With the word ignorance (which is often negatively associated) I don’t want to bring in any judgement of the
not-knowing but/and I think it is important to see that this ignorance comes with a system that is violent, so I guess this ignorance is also violent. Paradox?
39 This is a, not totally correct, quote of Mahatma Gandhi, the correct one is: you must be the change you wish
to see in the world. I don’t believe that change can happen as a single you but rather as a we. I believe that he actually thought the same.
16 Bibliography:
Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence, Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020 Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me, Spiegel& Grau, 2015
Ende, Michael. Momo, Thienemannverlag, 1973 Hildyard, Daisy. The Second Body, Fitzcarraldo, 2017
Lepecki, André. Dance, Documents of Contemporary Art, MIT Press, 2011
Lugones, Mariá. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003
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Acknowledgements
Here my interdependencies get real, shit! It is all about the scale:
Somehow, I feel the need to acknowledge (yes here again) that I can only live in those circumstances, in this richness, in this institution because of the outsourcing of struggles. Saying thank you to the people, other species, landscapes suffering from it would be maybe
cynical. I acknowledge it though.
Then to get more concreate, to me personally: Thanks family; bringing me into this life.
Thanks friends; surrounding me in it. Okay, okay specifically:
Thanks, people on the street for encounters.
Thanks, wonderful classmates of DU 21 for hanging around.
Thanks, amazing teachers of those 3 years at DOCH for really being supportive. Thanks, Hooman Sharifi, Antonija Livingstone, Zoë Pollock, Josefine Wikström. Thanks, Jund und Naiv and Feuer and Brot, James Baldwin, and all those other books and
podcasts I was hear-/reading. And thank you for reading this.
