Tirza Kater: Proofreading, or Tender Chunks in Gravy

Tirza's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lectures marathon at State of Concept in Athens, June 2018

Summary

Tirza sits centre-stage on a bench, laptop on her knees. We see a mac desktop projected on the screen behind her, an image on the desktop shows a makeshift construction to fix a camera to a stool. She recites the following link: www.dutchartinstitute.eu/page/6481/melissatuntun-DAI-2016-how-to-achieve-meaninful-integration-of-it and quotes the end of the summary of Sandar Tun Tun’s 2016 DAI-graduation presentation that can be found there: “They end by saying ‘this is a transition,‘ and this seems appropriate because the graduating students’ lecture performances are, after all, a formal ending of an educational and highly cooperative group experience that will inevitably transition to something else after graduation.“

A video is played, showing Tirza fussing around with some office equipment in a cozy, crammed domestic office space, between books in shelves and stacks, a wooden desk, sculptures, bric-a-brac and framed pictures. After the video ends, we see a continuous slideshow of improvised camera tripods using objects of furniture in presumably the same, middle-class domestic environment, interrupted occasionally by another video. “Slow boiled food, informal economy, location of exchange: the home.”

Continuing to read, Tirza recounts an anecdote of her mother calling, requesting her to watch her parents’ house – but without using it for anything like an exhibition or residency. She contextualizes that in her collaborative practice she often curates exhibitions and events for artists in her own and her parents’ home, where she organized a residency program and public events whenever they were gone. She goes on to elaborate on her investigations of the private, domestic sphere of the home as a site to work from and with, and its relation to working conditions. Distinguishing between “housework” and “work work”, she asks how this is “lived, displayed and made public”, expresses curiosity about the difference between collaboration and dependency, and questions why these issues should be less relevant when set in a bourgeois setting.

References mentioned are the writing of Helen Hester and Laboria Cobonik’s ‘Xenofeminist Manifesto’, and Frances Stark’s “The Architect and the Housewife”. Tirza  explains that she looks at the domestic as “ground from which to launch projects” and thinks about building support structures – this also in relation to having aging parents, which currently changes the way in which they wish to make their home public in the future. In concert with what is seen in the next video she plays, Tirza narrates the feeding of their aging cat Toekie when she did watch their home as requested, and the titular “tender chunks in gravy” make their appearance as the answer to the peculiar dietary requirements of Toekie the cat. This anecdote is interlaced with stories of the past residency of a choreographer in her parents’ home, which ended with a family portrait being taken of the guests and organizers in this space. Then, several videos are being arranged next to each other on the projected desktop, all showing phones – landline, no less – in different locations in the house, starting to ring as Tirza continues to read her text: “Dee is calling”. We see footage and hear an account about the relation with Dee, a proofreader, somewhere between friend and collaborator. Informal exchanges, mutual support and the slippage between friendship and business are addressed, jam, made with the parents’ neighbor’s berries, becomes part of the payment for the proofreading job.

Tirza describes how the making of the images and videos she is showing in this presentation were the compromise of making her parents’ home public in another way.  On the screen we see Tirza trying to talk her mother on the laptop screen through some technical difficulties with Skype, at times casually stroking Toekie. The planned conversation fails. While investigating the parental home in this different way, Tirza also researched the history of the building the apartment is located in, and is especially struck by a Dutch text on the facade. At the end of the presentation, she calls the landline of her parents, and her mother – who has been following the presentation via the live stream – picks up. On speaker, she translates the Dutch text on the facade of their house for the audience.

Responses

Maria Lind

Maria Lind enjoyed the final moment of direct contact in the presentation. What mostly triggered her curiosity was what Tirza has actually been curating, causing her to imagine what types of artworks and artists she might have worked with. She also wondered whether Tirza’s work uses these spaces as sites of actions, situations, and performances rather than straightforward curating of other peoples work. This she found more intriguing than the way it was presented, noting that the presentation was “talking about domesticity in a rather roundabout way”. Connecting to the theme of domesticity, she mentions the writing of Alexandra Kollontai, a Russian revolutionary who wrote about sexual relations and changed legislation. She mentions this as a source of inspiration and a historical reminder of the necessity to connect discussions around domesticity with “rather hardcore facts”.

Marina Vishmidt

Marina Vishmidt echoes some of Maria Lind’s comments and goes on to voice her own interest in the doubling gesture of making the home public twice, in the practice and in the presentation. This she calls an “interesting array of gestures” of oscillation between the public and private. She found the small domestic scale of Tirza’s method of presentation to be replicated in the approach, being almost a pointillist or miniature “women’s drawing” version of the home. Those cultural and art historical references arose for her also without an explicit feminist reference in the presentation. She found the “little peepholes” Tirza made repeatedly very interesting and would like to learn more about her practice in general – for this she passes the mic to Bassam El Baroni.

Bassam El Baroni

Bassam El Baroni begins his remarks by saying that Tirza’s thesis is excellent and well researched. He was intrigued by the “not very straightforward” format of the presentation, which for him links to the thesis’ historical unravelling of the present situation of working from home, connected to early concepts and ideas of telecommunication becoming a model of contemporary labour. There, he sees a relation to the way the DAI is operating, but also to Tirza’s work around the domestic site as a site of production. All this blends into the metaphor of liquidity for him, expressed through the chunks in gravy, the teardrops and jam. He sees a painterly quality in the way this is “morphed” into more abstract expressions, which he appreciated together with the “moments of exposure within the blurriness”. This expressionistic capturing of this state of fluidity between work and living, thinking and doing feels like an accurate portrayal and will stick with him the most. To wrap up, he congratulates Tirza on the successful presentation and very good thesis.

About Tirza Kater