Bread Tools and Mittens, performed at:

WALDKUNSTPFAD 08, Darmstadt, Germany (2008)

Bodies in Motion: Explorations in Perception and Performance, Florida Atlantic University, Florida, (2008)

S.C.U.M Manifesto Dinner/Performance, Chelsea College of Art, London February (2009)

Oberland Performance Art Festival  - grenzART 1, Kirschau Germany (2010)

 

WALDKUNSTPFAD 08, Darmstadt, Germany (2008)

Bread Tools and Mittens' was originally conceived for Waldkunstpfad, Darmstadt Germany, an international show, which takes place in an urban forest. A performer wears two breads for mittens and stands by a table, on which lie objects, which are moulded out of dough and resemble tools. The composition suggests the possibility of tasks, which can however not be fulfilled. The body stands while the hands remain unable to engage and the tools remain untouched. Bread, traditionally a symbol of nourishment and wealth, is subverted to become that which disturbs and disables; neither hands not tools can act.
 

Oberland Performance Art Festival  - grenzART 1, Kirschau Germany (2010)

GrenzArt 1 (2010) took place inside an abandoned textile factory in Kirschau, which used to employ some 3000 worked during the time of the DDR, but could not compete once the borders to the West were opened. The performance was reconceived to reflect on the destructive aspects of the modern economy and capitalist system.
The performer stands by a desk which would have been used by a factory employee. Taking a knife she hollows out two loaves of bread to use as mittens. Sitting down at the desk with her hands in mittens the figure is unable to 'work' or 'do'. Instead her hands slides around and down the table and take the figure to the floor, where she lies face down, motionless, her head at the feet of the surrounding audience. Eventually she gets up and walks off leaving the bread mittens behind.

 

 
'Bread Tools and Mittens' addresses an everyday that is bound by modes of production and measured in terms of productivity. Caught in these parameters we see, and experience, the body in terms of its utility, limiting our engagement with the world.

The work is the third in a series of performances with Flush (2002/ 2204) and Extreme Ironing (2007/2008). The set of interventions take familiar work processes and materials of the everyday and subvert their rational and purpose. Through choreographic and cinematic strategies such as repetition and doubling familiar activities turn into absurd rituals and play. The project draws on Blanchot’s essay ‘Two Versions of the Imaginary’, in which he develops the idea of art as a disrupted functionality. He argues that when a utensil is broken it raises as image, enabling us to 'see'. Equally Andre Breton asserted in his manifesto on the reality of things that we cannot see that which is 'bound by utility and guarded by common sense'.

In this performance a body is restrained and impeded from performing it a normal fashion. A familiar process of doing is withhold and patterns of making are suspended. In the process the body itself becomes visible and is reinstated as a site beyond purpose.

Blanchot also writes about the ‘interruption of the incessant’, meaning also the interruption that the incessant itself produces, thereby creating a disruption or at least the possibility of a break. Translated into performance the incessant is a durational, task-based activity which hovers somewhere between the logic of work and absurd variations and repetitions.

As art practice this kind of intervention subverts the everyday from which it borrows.

As performance practice it disturbs one system by creating another.