Tonight, we made a decent calamity on the streets of Charlottenburg. We congregated in celebration and honor of Eloise de Hauteclocque’s impassioned art, ultimately, in celebration of what we all hold dear in our lives; love and hope and fear and passion and home and pain and doubt and song and regret and …..SKIN!
Our installation performance began with a place of neutral & open body, as we disrobed then robed into the wearable art. We aligned ourselves into the hand-beaded poems and passions of Ms. Hauteclocque, who made these fabrics, and in full swing, we swung; the words thru space, the clothes thru contact, sweat and skin, the voice through some sinister karaoke moments. The proximity of revealing ourselves moved to the outside world. By taking the performance outside, the gold-framed windows separating us held representation of the way we tend to be with each other; slightly divided and disillusioned (sometimes blissfully so), yet ultimately transparent. Nevertheless, we are unified in all this suffering and delighting of our human experience. With a final loooong pause, tender eye contact and a sweetened-by-rain kiss, we, like a tribe of latter-day dervishes, flung the art into the night air, and circled the block, with naked conviction.
The confounded tourists snapped photos, the audience, amused, joined with us in heart, and the art now owns a new history. Consummating the exhibit and igniting our own courage, we give thanks to Elena, Eva, Robert, Tatjana, Guido, Liz, Tallulah, Meredith, Eloise and Institut Francais de Berlin for this opportunity to experience and add our innocence, bravery and charge to a night of Berlin art.
