“I'm surrounded by big dark paintings of brick walls, padlocked grilles and gates. My body feels blocked. After a while it found a way out through light affective interactions with people. I feel them on my body and some of them feel that something is happening.. My left hand blesses the 7 visitors that are with their backs towards me, in a line, looking at the notebooks and drawings in the vitrine.. My body carefully negociates its presence, trying to avoid too much attention. When it feels a visitor or, like now, a guard watching, it reduces its deviations to a minimum necessary for still maintaining the affective connections.. I'm pulled by the chest towards different people, constantly changing directions. This is difficult to normalize here, the guards are with their eyes on me. Now my body froze in this charged state. It's a good place for this, no guards here, and the visitors don't mind me too much. They usually throw a quick glance towards me and continue their thing, sometimes they look back again puzzled.. Slow and in a strange high state I go through the rest of the exhibition. It crosses my mind that, with its focus on sexuality and drugs, I might be somehow part of it. Because of this context my state can be associated with drugs, and my affective rapport with people can pass as more or less sexual, although it feels as the opposite, a light, subtle love.. I'm out in the sun, glad that here my behaviors are not so easily sexually read. Yesterday in a park someone asked us if we were doing some esoteric practice. I told him that not really, we just explore a special affective sensibility. He seemed disappointed. I added that indeed, this might have a spiritual dimension. He appeared satisfied.. I'm just walking in this charged state, only half here in this busy street. The tenebrous gates, walls and erotics of the exhibition feel far away, in an artworld that now, paradoxically, feels somehow locked.” (2023 April 23, Love in the frame of Unofficial Unworks at KW Berlin)
“I know that these icons with Christ overgrown by jungle plants are supposed to criticize Christianity, yet, my body feels almost like praying to them. This feeling extends to the other works here, to people too. I'm now bathing in this sensitivity, I'm turning around capturing these affects on my body. Now I'm turning around with my left hand energized, sending a sort of love in the entire space, to works and people. This must be "blessing". I don't know if they can receive it. It might appear as performance, or, to insensible people, as craziness. Now my hand turned towards the sky, ceiling actually, my chest too, warm, charged with love.. A shift occurred, the hand went from blessing to receiving, my phone too. My body does some mini movements to capture and to better integrate these affects coming my way. They're not coming my way, they are everywhere, I just happen to sense them now. Actually it's not just happening, it's my practice.. I'm pulled back from this installation by the jungle Jesus icons, and now by the medicinal plant works on the opposite wall.. I'm pulled by my chest in quick succession by different works, different people, sharply and apparently randomly changing directions.. Sometimes my body initiates the attitude and the movements of embracing people, but they don't respond.” (2022 July 3, Unexperiences in the frame of Unofficial Unworks at Berlin Biennale)
“I reach for the phone on the table, but on the way something changes and, instead of grabbing it, I just rest my hand on it. I stayed like that for a while. For a while I kept moving my fingers slowly, above the keyboard, without writing, enjoying the movements in my fingers. I stretched out my palm, floating at a little distance parallel with the screen. This reminded me of doing therapy with my hands and I started to transmit healing energy through the screen to this text and to you the reader. I realized that this can be ridiculous so in the same posture my presence became like an abstract dance. I'm very sensitive to this posture. Now I just stay casual in it, finally writing all this. I start to relate to the phone as something very abstract, like I have something alien in my hand and the movements of writing are more and more astract ad alen to, shs sj nydg fgfj..” (2020, October 15, Unimages in the frame of Unofficial Unworks at Aether Gallery Sofia)
Unofficial Unworks are Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, Love appearing uninvited in art venues and other public spaces, enacted by visitor-performers, affecting some of their implicit conventions and expectations. As visitors we usually conform, performing our roles, consuming quietly what is in front of our eyes. As artists we mostly follow artworld's implicit codes, protocols, structures of validation, hoping to be seen, invited, appreciated. As people we conform to prevailing perspectives and certainties. Artists can and should sometimes deviate from these dynamics. And visitors too.
Soon: Unofficial Unworks at various venues during Gallery Weekend Berlin, April 28-30. Performers: Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras.