العبور

fay

fay is a performance artist based in the netherlands. their work deals with durational research developed through bodies, tongues and the precarity of presence. their urgency to create art comes from their need to find language by utilizing a methodology of stealing time. www.faaaay.com

#transit #walkingasperformance #precariousbodies #walkaspilgrimage

العبور, fay, performance, 2023. Image credit: fenia kotsopoulou

Can you give some background to this project?

This project was conceived in the last years of my artistic research master's degree. Informed by my background in gender, sexuality, and women's studies, I was seeking alternatives to conventional language.

Through inviting the audience to join the route of a pilgrimage around the city of Arnhem, the question is posed of “how does a precarious body preserve itself?” Performed from sunrise to sunset, the audience is invited to make use of the map provided, walk towards any of the points and dwell, they are also invited to join the performer during the pilgrimage, and leave whenever they feel. The action questions the value of time in the context of performing a durational ritual, the pilgrimage, and, additionally, asks other bodies to negotiate time and space in precarious conditions.

Within my practice, I employ a methodology of 'stealing time,' initially through durational pieces of nonstop speaking. I work with ideas aimed at asserting marginalized bodies within space, exploring the notion of never arriving at a concrete 'point.' This stream-of-consciousness practice is always accompanied by a walk. I thought about the possibility of expressing everything and nothing simultaneously, without relying on speech as a language for my body and the act of walking to say everything instead.

Walking is a fundamental aspect of the methodology of 'stealing time.' The project's score spans an entire day, anywhere from 8 to 15 hours. Walking forms the framework of the work, it’s really the mold holding together the concepts that I am working with. By contemplating precarity — as I mentioned, the entrapment in language — I could simply propose, 'I'm going to walk the whole day. Do you have time to join me?' This proposition inherently exposes the conditions of precarity in time, resource, etc.

What is Walking to this work?

How did the passers-by or the participants respond?

Participants came at different points, some participants did not manage to make it because they could not find the route or me, which was frustrating to them - revealing also their very precarious position. of course, they had somewhere to be and something to do. Some joined for a whole round, and many passersby had also things to do places to be, which also revealed their pracarity, allowing me to just pass by in some cases. However, to the rest of the experience, I would sum up in Ernesto Pujol’s words “The experience of complete un-noticeability, of total freedom on a sidewalk or path, is mostly a white experience.”*

* Pujol, E. (2012). Sited body, public visions: Silence, stillness and walking as performance practice. New York, NY: McNally Jackson Books

العبور, fay, performance, 2023. Image credit: fenia kotsopoulou