Hole

PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION
Graduation project ArtScience Interfaculty, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2016
Exhibited in Art Rotterdam, Intersections, 2017 (guest artist - Satellietgroep)
And Gallery LgHWR, The Hague, 2018

Video + photography + audio installation
based on a long durational performance.
Digging a hole for 8 months.

The work had as a point of departure a long durational performance in which I dug a hole for eight months in an artificial beach. I followed a strict set of rules: I must go once a week with basic equipment and dig as much as I could during the few hours of light that the Dutch winter provides. I challenged my body at the same time I took measures to care for it: the task became to make a place for myself, a shelter. I engaged in a conversation with the wind: it was clear that we were both the makers-unmakers of the hole. I could feel it hitting the ceiling of my apartment and I would imagine its actions while I was away.

A hole is a matter of definition.
Of resolution, of determination
to find it or make it.
It is a matter of how to define matter
and what it is that matters.
A hole is an opening.

The few passers-by in that far off place saw at a distance a figure at work, and they would approach me. As if they were scripted, everyone asked the same question: ‘what are you doing?’, although they could clearly see what I was doing.
I refused to give reasons. So very interesting, honest and intimate conversations occurred in that isolated location after overcoming the first impulse of people to possess explanations. I realized I had an uninvited audience, that what I was doing wasn’t just an action, but a performance.

I documented the experience by writing (see full text in: ‘publications’), and presented it in the form of an audiobook -a narration using my own voice - in the installation space. I also produced a series of photographs consisting of one photograph of the hole the way I would find it each week and one of the way I would leave it after digging, always from the same un-referenced perspective. Finally, I made a video that takes the perspective of the hole.

Designed by Márton Kabai  |  Finalist in contest Felifa Futura, Buenos Aires.
Book available in Stroom Den Haag and Turma Buenos Aires.