Time, my dear rival

Human agency and time ripples through the raw perspective of Maria Klaassen-Andrianova.

Two rags and two buckets, one contains clean water while the other is pigmented with pink drops. This is the material nucleus of the performative installation that on March 17th [2023] opened the exhibition ‘’Life Potential’’, curated by Ersin Eken and Leon Stoffelen at the gallery Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam. The visual artist in collaboration with the performers Kenzo Kusuda and Zumrad Mukhrimova delineated a space to observe the imperturbable agentive features of time upon human actions.

The theme of sedimentation crosses transversally a double repertoire of languages: Kenzo’s consecrating and simultaneously intuitive pace and Zumrad’s reactions rooted in a subconscious habitus with the manners of an unquestioned daily life. In fact the performance reveals a triple duet. The couple of rags, the couple of performers, Human and Time, all studded with the multiple interactions which manifests through the space-time-material configuration of the oeuvre. An impassive Kenzo duets with Time, playing out the only possible damnatio memoriae through the incessant stirring of liquid matter and with the indefatigable, meticulous and almost obsessive care that the Human dedicate to events for the vane or illusory control upon them.

A queer context for observers and objectivity

Fluidity, pink and the blurred borders of the formal space where the performace takes place re-inscribe the happening in a queer context. Klaassen-Andrianova cunningly escapes the dialectic of the opposites, despite the strongly dualistic visual presence of the couples to question the multiplicity of factors at play as she is used to implement the dimension of time as crucial engine of her works. The mixing of the elements and of roles results in unexpected dramaturgical turns, necessary as much as surprising, as a result of the continuous and palpable active listening sustained and enacted by the two throughout the act.

Another pole is the observer that feeds, becoming also marker-of, the space of the apparatus where Kenzo and Zumrad act who become in turn the explorers of new horizons making useless the efforts of those audience members trying to give them space. Time erase with unrelenting insistence every trace left by human, re-inscribing borders, materiality, memories.

In this system permeated by porous possibilities for a causal but non-deterministic development of events there are also people who participate without being conscious of it. The ones who just arrived or those who are leaving the exhibition are also participating to the stratification traced on the floor, leaving grey footsteps on the wet floor in the attempt of sneaking unseen in and out of the space. There’s not an absolute exteriority to events. Objectivity is not achieved by cutting perceiving subjects out of what is happening but by becoming aware observers of the permeable socio-natural-cultural borders which work as passage for elements of time and matter, space and historiality.

An arrow of time

I am left wondering what would have had happened if this performance would have been taking a really extensive duration of time. At the end of those 30 minutes the water in Zumrad’s bucket that was transparent in first place, begun to show the first effects of entropy, the other great component of this play. In her bucket starts to appear light shades of colour and the liquid traces that used to cancel out the pink ones from Kenzo are transformed in a new transcription: the water in her bucket is slowly turning pink-ish. Roles begin to fade and time gains a materializing agency, generating evidences for a possible coincidence of matter, time and space. Matter enacts generating events that don’t develop in time but that are themselves extended time and space, becoming continuously active past and already enacting future in present.

The exhibition is open until April 16th [2023] where together with works from Marijn Brussaard, Sjoerd Martens, Koes Staassen and Mirjam Vreeswijk it will be possible to find the multimedial work by Klaassen-Andrianova that inspired this performance. Leaving outside the field of view the effects of rags on the floor the video installation ‘’The Rival’’ is based on similar premises and focusing exclusively on relations and interactions between the two performers. The familiarity of the action makes the many layers of the artwork accessible to a heterogeneous group of people who can find in it many fragments of the socio-natural-cultural language of human interactions.

this article has been published in the number of April 2023 on the italian magazine DanzaSì.