January 2022 in ARS Art Factory
Two women, uninterested in achieving security neither on stage nor in the social sphere, explore the relationship between material and body, giving fragility a form.
Bodies and clay - simultaneously fragile and durable by nature - are placed in the space of dialogue, where experience recreates itself in interaction, materiality carries a question, and an executed act becomes an artwork. Opportunities arise for collision, accident, and the constant construction and deconstruction of the material. The unexpected produces fragility.
"Body Slam" is an installation performance by Keithy Kuuspu and Liisa Saaremäel, focusing on the materiality and fragility of clay and the female body. The performance uses an exhibition hall as the venue and researches how visual art and performance could symbiotically activate and feed one another. The installation was independently accessible during the daytime, but the performers' bodies and soundscape turned the exhibition into a performance in the evening.
In the beginning of June 2022, "Body Slam" was invited to Maardu Dekennaal, a festival in the small town of Estonia. As the event's emphasis is to create the integration of Estonian- and Russian-speaking communities - local and artistic - we decided to transpose our work from the exhibition hall to the urban landscapes. Wearing the clay armors in the streets of Maardu and creating encounters with the locals in everyday life situations - buying groceries, swimming in the sea, hanging laundry etc. - contests the material in new situations and helps to develop it further.
Unexpectedness carries in itself the fragility. We hold precious the work with clay in relation to the human body and the poetic territory in between them. Clay - resisting weight but not a slam. What remains are only the fragile bodies of the two women.
project instagram: destinationunknown12hmr
Creators and performers: Keithy Kuuspu, Liisa Saaremäel
Sound designer: Mihkel Maripuu
Technical solutions: Tarvo Porroson
Pictures: Gabriela Leopard
Graphic design: Cristopher Siniväli
