Episode 07: Body As Measure

Yuka Oyama: So thank you very much for the invitation. It’s a pleasure to be back to Stockholm. I used to teach at the HDK Valand in Gothenburg and now I’m back in Germany.

And this is where we meet, common backgrounds, as Anna also comes from Germany and I have become a German citizen somewhere in the middle of my lifetime. And we have discussed what kind of points we could expand today in half an hour based on the theme of Body As Measure. And we are going to draw closer attention to extended body in our artistic practices.

Anna Mlasowsky: So I am an artist and curator and professor now for Glass and Ceramics at Konstfack University. And I immigrated to the US before I now moved part-time at least back to or to Stockholm last year. So I’ve been here for a year and I’m going to walk you first through my work before Yuka walks you through her work and the different ways that I use the body as an extension and also how I use material as an extension because we’ve had meetings before we’re sitting here today and talked a lot about our work with each other and kind of really figured out that something that is a commonality for us is how we use both materials and the body as an extension. For me art is an activity, it’s a verb and not a noun and specifically in craft we focus so much on the maker but then and the makers touch while we make something and this intimate interaction with the material yet and then yet whenever we display it the maker is completely missing and for me the maker has always had this presence in different ways in the work. Maybe we can start questioning. Yeah because I we’ve talked so much and we found so much overlap we could fill this for two hours here but there’s something you we’ve talked a lot about identity and how identity plays into our work and it’s very different and you were just working us walking us through your practice talking about the objects of everyday life how they are identity making and so in our conversation you’ve always talked about identity making as from from the side of objects and I am seeing my performances and my objects as identity reaffirming which is a very different kind of perspective onto it and in that sense also you talk about objects as ways that make identity and then when I think about my work I have been making some work recently very recently where I am instead of having performers interact with objects I make the objects themselves performative and the way I find instead of finding identity in everyday objects I find identity in materials and the materiality of these objects speaks to to kind of the the idea that I want to get across so this is a really recent piece and it’s just a shot in my studio and here I’ve been using this is a Madonna procession figurine inspired piece that’s supposed to be carried it sits on these cobblestones that in East Germany we use in protests throwing them at the police so there’s these protest rocks and it’s called Suhu’s shoulders and it’s this cow’s hip bone together with these materials in these little bowls that are all health products supplements for women that you should take at a certain age in order to kind of optimize yourself so they are they’re also what this top piece actually makes the shape of a uterus the inside and it’s painted in these supplements which is folic acid and calcium alfalfa leaf juice powder activated charcoal so that the paint itself are the supplements and so I’ve been expressing this like identity reaffirming or rejection as well which is also a form of affirmation through materials rather than through objects and so it’s been very interesting to see how differently we approached it and

Yuka Oyama: also what we’re saying is I would have I have a question we both work with costumes and wearable sculptures but the way how you extend the body through the glass sometimes they are worn and sometimes it is the the abstract forms that resonate or reminds people the viewers of the body yeah right so what is your decision to to like sometimes make it wearable extension of the physical your body to that’s extended and separated from the body but positioned in a space how do you make this kind of distinction

Anna Mlasowsky: I don’t know how or why I make the decision necessarily. It’s usually based on kind of the theme that I’m working with, so for me there is… I don’t make a difference between a body and an object. For me an object is another body and I think it comes all from the background of that as a woman you’re always considered a vessel for something or as a human. And then so if I’m already a vessel then there’s no difference between me and this thing. It just takes a different form and so considering them interchangeably, I can transfer agency between an object and a body and then in some of my work specifically some more narrative video work that I’ve been doing in between 2015 and 2018 I used the landscape as objects too where I would specifically play on having in this video piece landscapes I had a very hot landscape a volcanic landscape an icy landscape I had an inflatable space and a tunnel that was connecting these and in each of these four different locations different activities were taking place that were the body was an agent that was facilitating a transformation and so the landscape itself became a body in which a body would act so it’s all more about relationships and this is why I think for me both it exists externally as objects but then also internally as performance and even though like we also talked about how for you it’s so important that you can work with your that you perform some of the things yourself. And for me, we talked about this a lot, right?

It’s like, why would you or why would you not? And also, Lauren talked about it. And I do always practice and make out the choreography with me and myself alone in the studio. But then it was for me very important to take my own body out of the image so that it doesn’t become about me, because it’s not about me. Even though, and also the work is so personal, that having that distance is sometimes quite important.

Yuka Oyama: Well, I think that myself being a jewellery artist has a very large impact on being the actor in my performance. Because you put it on and then need to know what’s the shift of my mind here. And this was important and also in a place where I studied, jewellery is so tiny.

It has such a tiny presence. And this is a virtue and beauty thing, but also I want to always challenge that. And the approach that we work on is so…

Bit needs loud voice to voice out there. And this is how I started to engage with working in the public space and including participations of the viewers, as well as me going really into the public to speak about what that is, that extended thinking of jewellery can also be really like a more human-based artistic language.

Anna Mlasowsky: Right, and for me what often happens is that by embodying my own objects, playing and working with them, I can get to the emotionality and then I want to re-externalise it. But then of course there’s also pieces like this performance where I hand stitch the word Haimat, which is home or place of belonging, into my hand and then documented how the thread worked its way out of my skin through two weeks of just performing everyday life, setting up exhibitions and working in the studio. And it was really important there that this was me who was performing this piece. And it was also a private performance, so there’s for me also a big difference between what I experience with my work in the studio and the way it’s being performed with the self and then the way it’s performed in front of an audience.

And the video I have been showing, it’s also showing like this is, I totally agree with all the discussions before, where I really find the biggest joy is actually making. And I do not see myself as a choreographer, but then I started to work more in performance. And exactly this choreography aspect is something I just had no idea. So I think this is the part of the exploration as soon as I incorporate performative essence in my work, then I would step into the field as well.

Speaker 3: So yeah, we also talked a little bit, or we’ve been kind of going back and forth and being on the edge of talking about like, what is the need for performance in our work? Why do we feel the need that there needs to be a performative element?

How do you think about your work? Yeah, it kind of relates to something earlier what you were talking about, where you were like, jewellery is so tiny, you know, you make it bigger, you’re enlarging it through bringing the body in and bringing performativity in. And for me, what happened is in the history of glass, there are no women. So bringing my own body into the work and bringing myself physically in the space of my work was kind of also reforming that there is room for female presence in this very male-dark-centered craft.

And in the spaces of the studio, there is a long history of a lot of women that drop out of working in glass, especially hot glass, after their studies, because that they don’t feel that there is a place for them where they can exist and where they’re being accepted. And so for me, it kind of comes in there.

Yuka Oyama: Yeah, to me, that was one aspect I really wanted to share is this sterile object starts to gain the life because somebody else put this on body. And the shift you have also mentioned, Bella, in your talk as well, jewellery piece in the vitrine, and it makes gain so much life in context when it sits on a human body and it starts to move, have a life of its own. This aspect is very important somehow to me. Only the object is kind of a story being told halfway. And I want to really tell the full story. But also the real story that sits are the people’s experiences of taking part in my project. And I really suffer how to share this aspect. And it would be too kitschy to have writing and their email saying, thank you, blah, blah, blah, or interview and how you felt.

I mean, then it would be like tech space. And so this is where I’m really stinking. Like, how can I share that aspect of taking part in this and what is to really claim the value of the work?

Anna Mlasowsky: I want to just kind of add on to that before you ask me the question because you’re like taking part in the work. And so that’s why I pulled up this piece.

It’s playing right now. It’s a book of poetry that I’d written that you can only read when breathing onto the page and then temporarily the text appears and then disappears. So a bridging that gap between audience and object and facilitating that interaction and kind of shortening the distance was really something that for me, I feel is happening in that piece.

Yuka Oyama: And how to make that accessible when you disseminate your artwork in the exhibition context and not to make people think like, I missed the party. This is something I would really not want to do, but I guess the archive and documentations are the ways one means to really expand what has happened too. If I could ask you, why do you still hold on to glass? I’d be very interested in knowing.

Anna Mlasowsky: Yeah, that’s a big one. Everybody here, that’s my colleague or my student. I’ve been kind of going on about this for way too long, but for me, glass is… Everything is a material to me, and glass is the only thing that’s not a material to me. To me, glass is part of my character.

It expresses a lot of the parts that I feel that are hard to express in words in a material. And if you think about glass as an amorphous solid, it never crystallized, it doesn’t form any regular molecular structure. It’s a liquid solid, which really relates to my identity as a queer person, where everything is constantly in transition and flux, and then also the material is the only material we know that is both transparent and opaque. It has so many things on the spectrum that it offers me all these different abilities and states and appearances that I can choose from.

So in a way, it’s a little bit like the glass itself is a costume. Every morning you wake up, you just think about who do I want to be today? And then in your studio, you work, you’re engaged with that aspect of this material. So for me, it’s an extension of myself rather than a material, and so that’s why it’s kind of kept a place in my practice. And for two years, I completely walked away from it and didn’t work with it at all, and then ended up just returning to it because I ended up being attracted to materials or processes that would do exactly what glass would do. And so it doesn’t feel like a material, and that’s the beautiful part of it.

I was also thinking in terms of your work, there was something we only talked briefly about in the back room. Why you choose certain materials over others? Because you are so multi-material.

Yuka Oyama: One thing is I stayed true to the message I want to address, and this work was about continuing to move and move and move and move, and moving is cardboard boxes. So to me, it was very important, it was very interesting to find this material sponsorship from the moving company. And they had tons of materials that I could use for free, anyway. And so that was that.

And then, for example, this work, it’s about connecting the space of two homes. And this was a COVID time, and I had to keep one and a half meter distance to protect each actor. So it’s a mask is here, and I wanted to protect the children to be bump-free.

So all these things, it’s important to me. For example, this material, it’s a yoga mattress material, but slightly thicker. And then this is fantastic material for me to do always a sketching, because it can make large forms, quite quick time, and then quite light. And because I put these on people, I have to assure that these are well-made and don’t hurt them if I would put it, you know, make it out of wood.

And if they fall in the performance, they can break, like really break legs, right? So this is what I want to avoid. And maybe this may be a good point to stop a conversation. Thank you. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you!