Sanne Kabalt ~ Take care in beholding the self

Sanne's 20 minute presentation for CONSTANT CRAVING ~ PERFORMING UNDER CONDITIONS - DAI's 3 day performance lectures marathon, June 2018 was entitled Take care in beholding the self.

Summary

Sanne sits on a chair, next to a microphone and surrounded in a half-circle by the audience, who is seated on the floor and chairs. She holds a stack of printed photographs and begins her presentation with the words “when you found a word for it, you can talk about it, point at it, and conclude. Since there is a word for it, it exists”. The text she reads addresses grief, loss, illness, the process of mourning. It questions words and their function in such a process, as well as reflecting on the medium of photography. The loosely structured, lyrically flowing text is read from the back of the prints, and regularly interrupted with Sanne’s acapella performances of three songs.

The first song is the mournful folk ballad ‘I Wish My Baby Was Born‘ by Riley Baugus, Tim Eriksen und Tim O’Brien. As the reading continues, Sanne states that the “need of the mourner is the need of the artist is the need of the writer”, and shortly after reads that “a sadness named is far less frightening than a sadness unnamed”. She describes the act of taking various photographs - one of a man holding a hand in front of another person’s face, and one of her father sleeping on a couch, about a year before he passed away.

After singing ‘Kathy’s Song‘ by Simon & Garfunkel, the text ventures into a reflection of photography as “far from passive” and photographs being “more than a piece of paper or jpg file”. It wonders about the potential confusion of the photographed subject with the depicted person and calls this the “small step from accurate depiction to uncanny aliveness”. After considering the transformative effect of an onlooker’s gaze, Sanne sings ‘I've Been All Around This World’, a country song which was covered countless times under several titles.

The text ends with a consideration of the expression “to capture something” – used in regard to words, photographs and works of art – and asks if one can employ words and photographs without “capturing, imprisoning, containing”, but instead to unsettle, to bring to life. “When the seer does not know where the artwork ends and the thoughts, body, life begins, photographs stir and words breathe”.

Responses

Maria Lind

Maria Lind liked how Sanne handled the photographs in her presentation, as something to hold, to flick through, thus becoming part of the process. She shared that she could never really accept the idea of photographs framed on a wall, which feels “awkward” to her as opposed to photographs reproduced and looked at in a book. Another option is having lose printouts to examine at one’s own pace, a mode which was evoked by Sanne’s performance. She wondered about Sanne’s use of the generic term photography and suggests a differentiation between analogue and digital photography – the mentioned “capturing of something” relates for her to analogue photography. She references Roland Barthes’ ‘On Photography’ and more specifically the punctum, the moment in the image of his deceased mother where “memories unravel”. She believes this is the type of capture Sanne is “working through” in relation to her own experience. Considering today’s abundance and different conditions of production of photography, she doubts that contemporary digital photography still captures in the same way.

Connecting to previous presentations in the day, she discerned an interest in representation that can be traced back to the 80s and early 90s and to a particular discourse within photography, which was then a way to enter a critical discourse around the politics of representation and the “embrace of theory”. The occurrence of meaning in images was “so ripe and rich back then”, and she sees a return of this today, with the backdrop of the digital universe we are entangled with. She expresses curiosity if Sanne is actually interested in photography and what would happen if she would take some of these things more into account. She also could imagine the entire performance to be sung.

Rachel O’Reilly

Rachel O’Reilly mentions Sanne’s question, “How to unsettle capture?” and the references she picked up from the previous year’s theory class, especially Freud and Klein. She expresses amazement at Sanne’s voice and the strength of difference between the fragile moments and the “powerful journey she goes on” between song and image. She thought  there was room to experiment more with the combination of the different elements she is interested in. She points out that the journey- and storytelling songs chosen by Sanne are much more specific than the more general language used regarding photography and wonderes how Sanne could become more specific also in the images, to think through storytelling more as a performance. For her, following Sanne in the story of the death of her father is very easy, but there is more specificity there that is hard to expose – potentially this could be achieved by connecting the image and singing a bit more.

Rachel O’Reilly mentions the Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, who makes “humble images” and “un-minor events”, using anecdotes and narrative impressively to draw audiences into longer performances. As a final comment on the combination of the elements, she mentions the stillness she experienced during the presentation, which contained the vulnerability of Sanne, and says she can see how there is more space to play not only between “the seer” and the visible but also between stillness and movement or narrative. The relationship between the powerful voice and contained images stayed set, and because Sanne is interested in the seam and materiality of the image, she would be curious about “making the materiality move” in the performance, and potentially breaking the frame.

Hypatia Vourloumis

Hypatia Vourloumis thanks Sanne for her bravery and generosity, noting her continuous attempt to figure out how and what to photograph, and how to perform these images, refusing the framing on the wall to facilitate a different relation between the “seer” and the image. She points to the beginning of the presentation with Maggie Nelson’s question “are words good enough” in relation to naming loss, before the first song transported the audience into the “realm of affect”, becoming both affected by Sanne’s singing but also witness to her capacity to be affected herself. Summarizing the presentation, she describes the themes and questions addressed: fleetingness of gestures and movement, how to represent loss, illness or being outside of language and the ethics of capturing are considered. The lyrics “With words that tear and strain to rhyme“ from ‘Kathy’s Song‘ by Simon & Garfunkel, are regarded by her as  an expression of Sanne’s own “strain” to find her own language e.g. in terms of the composition of the different elements text, song and image, agreeing with Rachel that the attempt to blur all these together could be pushed further.

The line from Sanne’s text “if the observer changes what is observed” is used as an example of a statement immediately followed up by a song, leading Hypatia Vourloumis to apply this thought to hearing which evokes the question of the choice of songs: how is a socio-political and historical context erased from especially the last song which is about the brutality of lynching? She invites Sanne to carefully consider the choice of songs and proposes to experiment more with the question of the unsettling of capture, elaborating on how affect blurs the different components employed by her as well as feelings, concepts and matters. Images here, together with songs and words, start to function as “ghostly matter” to her, a concept of the writer and sociologist Avery Gordon, describing that which haunts us in the here and now, present from a trauma which remains, inseparable from its sociopolitical context. Going forward she encourages Sanne to reflect on the mentioned references and questions, and to fully explore the potential within her desire to blur margins and the politics of this. She ends on the congratulatory note that Sanne’s thesis is “incredibly beautiful and has managed to dissolve margins within a theoretical work”.

About: Sanne Kabalt