BEHIND ENTHUSIASM

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PhD research

with the performance, video and installation

Theater hall Students Cultural Center, Belgrade, Serbia 2018.

Performers collaborators: Adrien Gaume, Danijela Vučković, Heather Rikić

Nemanja Bošković, Olga Uzikaeva, Ayumi Toyabe, Marko Kojić

Katarina Nikolić, Anamarija Marinković

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 Marysia Lewandowska defined enthusiasm1 as a “type of motivation”, “the force independent from professional commitments”, as a “drive not dictated by financial gain” but “a result of a hidden passion and a need for self-realisation”.

Project BEHIND ENTHUSIASM examines the type of energy, which initiates and keeps in motion the wheel of production of an art work, without any institutional or production support. It is based on the premise that all aspects of contemporary work depend on enthusiasm from the very start. The mantra of the current labour market, regarding both material and immaterial labour, activates those ultimate resources we possess – our innate humanity, desires, emotions, passions, willingness, life aspirations. However, the mantra consisting of words such as “networking”, “exchange”, “communication”, “experience”, “gaining new skills and improving free of charge”, most of the time solely mobilises just unpaid/volunteering work – work “out of enthusiasm”. Enthusiasm is, thus, appropriated into the domain of capitalist exploitation.

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What, then, can be found behind enthusiasm, if enthusiasm is a new norm? What sets a creative process in motion? Project BEHIND ENTHUSIASM attempts to formulate some answers to these questions.

    Behind enthusiasm is a multimedia project that involves participants of the independent and self-organised art scene, the most precarious element of the art world, whose practice can be indeed best described with words such as motivation, experience, passion, desire or hope. This project brings together and connects dance performers and artists who are exploring self-expression, predominantly through the techniques of the Japanese Butoh dance. Butoh is credited for freeing the bodily movements, enabling performers to express those dormant experiences in their bodies, both individually and collectivelly. Historically speaking, Butoh dance was an artistic response to the catastrophe of human suffering, in particular to the traumatic experience of the atomic bomb. One of the features of expressionist forms of dance, with Butoh being its most radical form, is the assumption that dance is not performed for the gaze of others, but that it represents an ultimate expression of the internal (world). Performers are seeking the spaces “behind enthusiasm”.

   The performers and dancers appear in the gallery space also as models of a fictitious fashion label Behind enthusiasm, which has evolved out of intimate research of the Belgrade independent fashion designers’ scene. Several informal interviews and conversations with designers and tailors are exhibited as voices of the “real life” and as the evidence of lived experience. Words written into the garments – WORK, I’m Tired, Solidarity, Soft, Work-Work, Je suis riche et calme (I am rich and calm) – frequently appeared during the research process and became something resembling slogans on the bodies, which are either static or in motion. The label Behind enthusiasm turned its own manufacturing process inside out, similar to a sandwich man who would carry slogans showing how to make slogans and sell your own body as a shop window.

    The performance process is captured in the drawings that represent different “research scenes”. Even though each of them could be individually contemplated, drawing here is presented not as an “object with aura”, but as a “note in space” – as a segment of an installation in space or as a segment of a collage, comprised of living bodies of dancers who participated in this project “out of enthusiasm”.

Jelena Vesić,

independent art historian, curator and lecturer

translated by Svetlana Rakočević