Leon Filter ~ Farewell, doors
Leon's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lecture marathon at State of Concept in Athens, June 2018.
Farewell, doors
Summary:
Leon begins his presentation by thanking those who supported it’s making. The enactment to follow is framed as “a step in the endeavor to understand [his] obsession with indexical and genealogical structures” and his dependency on them. He asks: “Where do things derive from?” but also shares his reluctance to let this question determine the outcome. Leon stresses the possibility to “charge” genealogical thinking and states that he wants to “lay a thread through this field of origins”. With the help of Areumnari Ee, Leon carries a pedestal onto the stage area and stand on it – thus both blocking and becoming part of the projection surface for the video. There we see a simple computer-generated architectural simulation of an endless hallway with walls and openings, through which we keep moving for most of the presentation.
Leon reads a text about about growing up without many doors in his parents’ house, and with their belief that “if you have to close a door behind you, something is wrong with the relationships you maintain”. The doorless household was sold to Leon and his brother as an architectural concept instead of a lack: Instead of doors they got something better – an “open floorplan” and truly unique living space. The reality looked a little less rose-tinted, we learn, and the lack of privacy caused conflict and annoyance in the siblings and parents. In the end, the concept failed and some walls and doors were finally built. Still – the concept held power and Leon continued to equate doors with troubled relationships well into his adult life. He shares his understanding of the function of a door: to divide rooms from each other and to keep things out and separated. This means that “if you don’t have a door, you can only let things in and look out” and have to adjust to deal with all the incoming information, which in turn determines your behavior.
We learn that the no-door concept was not fully consistent, and the presence of some doors in the family home hinted at the gaps in the ideological construct – the bathroom and parental bedroom could indeed “keep things out”. Leon tells us that the remains of the “super-pragmatic, hastily crafted ideology” fully crumbled when Leon’s parents moved to a new house, and casually mentioned the doors about to be put in their place, leaving Leon first shocked to learn about the bad state of his parents’ relationship and then realizing that the doorless concept was established for financial reasons, rather than ideological ones.
We learn that these parents also created distractions for their children by reading them stories of Greek mythology, often narratives about family struggles with “radical outcomes”. One such story, the one of Theseus and the Minotaur, stuck with Leon and he quickly retells it. Then the projection is turned off, and in a pitch-black room we hear a recording of Leon’s voice describing an impossible, rather non-sustainable house planned by his father. As the light slowly turns back on, Leon describes the specifics of the design of this house while the camera moves around in the space of the gallery, over the ceiling, shoes against the walls, the audience, marble stairs and finally downstairs into a room with only a green pleather bench. We are moving through the very real architecture of the gallery we are sitting in, and through the imaginary architecture described in the recording at the same time. The figure of “the unfit and inappropriate” is mentioned – coming originally from anthropology, this figure is used to argue against the notion of the survival of the fittest.
While the recording plays, Leon sets up a ladder in the space before the projection screen, where we now see a vertical rectangle of light projected, again partly on Leon who has climbed on the ladder, facing the audience and holding up a small square mirror. In silence, Wilfred Vlad Tomescu, Olga Micińska, Luca Carboni and Sanne Kabalt are standing spread throughout the space until just outside the open entrance door, all holding up similar small square mirrors. They try to pass around between them the light of the projection by catching and reflecting it with their mirrors, and Leon finally returns the light to the projector, or in the direction of the gallery’s exit door.
Responses:
Hypatia Vourloumis
Hypatia Vourloumis appreciated the complexity and architecture of the presentation. She enjoyed the opening through sharing Leon’s interest in “indexical and genealogical structures” and liked what happened between the animated projections and the rather amusing family anecdotes. She points out that the structural differences described by Leon were fictions or myths, collapsing something that seemed important to him as a child. She links to “the threshold of Daedalus and the labyrinth” and expands on the narrative, adding that the Minotaur was a product of Pasiphaë falling in love with the bull that King Minos had refused to sacrifice, which lead Poseidon to punish King Minos by having his wive fall in love with the bull and Daedalus helped her copulate with by building a mechanical bull. She stresses the absurd demonization of the Minotaur as monster and mentions that the presentation evoked the ambiguity of the family home and the question what monsters may lurk under the bed there. For her there was a sense of unknowingness and mystery, an allusion to some kind of oppressive structure, and to architecture as aspiration.
The graphic of the opening or door at the end of the presentation created an opening to the resistance to reproduction he is insisting on, and this opening up is reflected and refracted by the mirrors to her, breaking the linearity of the projection through refraction. Rather than just going outside, this brought in the outside, complicating the binary of inside and outside through the multiple threshold and planes of the refraction, reflecting “indexical presence” in Adrian Piper’s sense. Drawing a connection between the beginning and end of the presentation, Hypatia Vourloumis describes how it started with indexicality and ended in a poetic indexical moment. She giddily finishes her response on the note that she could not help but think of these questions of entries and exits and doors in relation to sexuality.
Maria Lind
Maria begins by sharing that coming from northern Europe, she is very familiar with the phrase “please close the door” to ensure the heat stays inside. She mentions the positive connotations of the door as a protection of some sort and evokes Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of one’s Own’, unimaginable without a door. Leon’s presentation led her to think of the iconography of doors and she references the late 19th century photographer Eugène Atget, who produced over many years a series of photographs of Parisian front doors, which she tells us have also been studied – perhaps surprisingly – by Walid Raad. This brings her to the notion of indexicality: while photography is considered as an indexical form, leaving little traces, Raad has questioned the truth claims of the index. He manipulates the archive as a special form of a collection of indexes, for example by making digital animations of door-openings of museums. She mentions the projected animation as part of the presentation, which struck her as similar to the aesthetics of the computer game ‘Minecraft’, rather than evoking a labyrinth. Finally, Maria Lind points to the crucial difference between door and door-opening, as she felt some slippage between the two during the presentation. She also questions whether “the voice as an index of Leon” is relevant or if it could be replaced by someone else’s.
Sven Lüttiken
Sven Lüttiken mentions the close relation between this presentation and Leon’s previous work, particularly the performance ‘Mummy the Daddy’ as well as his thesis. It strikes him as evident that some “pertinent avenues for reflection” are offered even for people less familiar with Leon’s work and notes this as a positive effect of the rich presentation. He addresses Maria Lind’s question about using someone else’s voice and draws a connection between the obvious interest in challenging not only the “paternal law“ or word of the father but also his image, pointing to the “indexical dimension to patriarchy” – the child as the indexical, genealogical link to the father, paternity proven by physical resemblance. Connecting these themes of the presentation further to the thesis, Sven points to Leon’s references, e.g. Georges Didi-Huberman’s writing about Roman ancestral wax effigies and the cult of the Roman family. Based on these observations, he makes the case that a replacement of Leon’s voice or presence by a performer as substitute might indeed be interesting. He describes the lack of photographic representational images in the presentation and the use of various stand-ins, refusals, strategies of avoidance, which create a range of imaginations in the audience rather than erase the image completely – with Leon as an embodiment of the male line in the family tree. To Sven the presentation is a productive continuation of Leon’s work around his ongoing interests and obsessions and is indicative of the potential to develop his practice in relation to the themes discussed in the thesis.
About Leon Filter