Answer to Sandra Jõgeva for the catalogue Diverse Univers 2008

Sandra: 1. Am I correct if I describe your performances as poetical gender studies? 2. Are you critical towards what our society expects from a female and a male person? 3. Why do you use quite classical elements of performance art (naked bodies, repetitive actions, found materials from the location) while delivering your message? 4. Is feminist thinking still relevant in contemporary society? Edwood answer: Why to use in a classic way in the performance: the naked body, the repetition of actions and found materials from the location while delivering my message. The performance as a means. The repetition of the movement allows the body to release itself from the representation. In theater, in dance, we have to interpret a character, a role: the actor has to compose between his character and his own person. In performance, no character, but it is all the same difficult to get rid immediately of its own role, mask and normalized, standardized, social behaviour, before going into action. That is why the repetition of the gesture brings gradually to let the body go, and to live inside this one, the moment of a present so precious. The repetition of the gesture leads to the body forgetting, his one ego, and allows bringing out of the ordinary its social envelope: it is a research, a state of absolute opening from the senses. The naked body is not a necessity in all my performances. These two performances made in DU, are the development of a work around the wash, and the ablutions. * The wash is a necessary action of the life being one earth. The ablutions are important rites in their symbolism of the life of the human beings. The naked body is one of archetype in the history of the religious representations and the pagan pictures. It is because it induces symbols profoundly buried in our memory and our collective unconscious, because the naked body and its representation get our imagination of an unsettled way. It puts in relation various states of consciousness: The fertility, the aesthetics, the canons of beauty, the eroticism, the war, the violence, the wild man, the love. From the Venus of Willendorf 23 000 years before JC, studies of Leonard de Vinci, Rubens, origin of the World from Courbet, expressionists, finally body art, happening and performance art. Here in these two performances " Male / Female: Magdalena, the ablutions ", the body is not in an aesthetic negotiation; it does not correspond to the canon of beauty of the woman or the man from 21th century. It corresponds to a necessity of meaning: when we wash ourselves, the body is naked, it lets itself to go to its own feeling: it does not have a psychology anymore. The use of objects chosen in context is required because it's convenient and it is also a political commitment. Obviously, it's convenient, because the performer artist would rather transport in his suitcase an " objects-tools " which produce tricks, concepts, or a process allowing him (her) to decline its performative proposition, than an" aesthetic object “. On the other hand, it is a political will because taking advantage of environmental objects, or materials, it is also to work about the performance in its own context, approaching the geographical, spatial and political situation in a physical action and in its socio-cultural environment. But any object is not good to take: In my opinion, the more the performance mobilizes materials; the more it makes the performance meaning complex. In my performances, each objects, even those witch are exploited from the space, answer to a meaning and a function requirement. Here no decoration, each object is useful. I try by this way to exploit it as much in their first function as in their diversion, by an almost tyrannical way. In the "Male / Female" performance with Maurice, the basin has been used at the same time to store the water and as a funnel. The water has been used for washing and has been entirely drunk. The lilac and the narcissuses flowers have been used for hitting and for caressing the body. The underwear made in cotton, which I was wearing were white because it evoked the purity. It has to be dirty because more a woman is free more she wants to provoke the domination. Maurice was naked to be washed. His face was hidden so that he could relax and put himself in his own sensations. The video was there because the text of this loving declaration is sublime and poetic, and because it sends back this performance to situations of the everyday life. * " You can make big things with little ability, and also produce little effect with too much. " My performances are like a partitions composed with the body and objects in which, I give a moderate part to the coincidence. When a gesture does not bring the wanted effect, then in the improvisation it is always the will to give a meaning to the action, which prevails rather than the aesthetics. I prefer to support ideas, because it is for me in these moments of improvisations that often the miracle of the immediate composition occurs. I am not really located as feminist artist. I only try to reveal certain taboo from the intimacy, gestures from the everyday life, the relations between man and woman. Actually, I try to look for first solutions in my own everyday life, explanations and reasons for myself, to analyse behaviour inherent to the psychology of the human relations. I feel first a human, then a woman. And because I am a woman, I developed a different sensibility from that of a man, perhaps less in the power and more in the balance, more poetic and less mental … in the performance " Moon Cup ", I also communicated on this new object, about which the women speak between themselves. (The Moon cup is a reusable menstrual cup around two inches long and made from soft silicone rubber.) It is a practical object above all. In the "Male / Female" performance with Maurice, I simply pushed Maurice to let himself go to my gestures, and be in his feeling. It's true, his action possibility was very restricted. But some men performers artists have done the same with women's body since many years, and we do not qualify them of" masculinist "? And then we shared his dirty waters, those which as been used for rinsing his body. The water: The wash is the privileged moment of the everyday life; it is the intimate moment, when the spirit let itself go to the body. We release ourselves of these tensions; it is a beneficial act above all. It is an altruistic gesture, an empathic gesture. But this gesture became ritual: the baptism, the ablutions of sacred water from the Ganges, a purifying gesture. Then, the symbolic content of the wash in public becomes different when it moves from the status of the private space to the public space status. The wash becomes then a sacred gesture. The cordon that connects jar of water with the electric ceiling light provokes a tension, evoke the danger, which contributes to sublimate the movement of the wash. This gesture is linked to the collective memory consciously or unconsciously, and to the holy pictures (Marie-Magdalena cleaning the feet of the Christ). The virgin and the prostitute, the mother and the whore: The woman waits for her prince charming and the man looks for his virgin. In a couple, she has this many roles, of mother, woman, and mistress. He has this many roles of father, man and lover. Sometimes the division between these various roles or rather the idealism of some people give the idea of a living couple impossible or painful. Then we are in a Manichean and dualistic plan of the gender relations. But in daily life, we rarely have so much distance with ourselves to analyze an emotional situation. This is why, the individuals put themselves in search of the absolute truth. “Three Marie Madeleine's faces: Marie Madeleine? Marie? Eve? Marie Madeleine's idea the sinner, is always present in our society. The big myths around the love and around the sexuality did not die yet. We are always in search of a delicate balance between the heavenly love and the physical love, between the libido and the ratio. " Vera Lewijse *Extract from the Mother and the Whore from Jean Eustache. "You know, when I met you, I'd just left her... I'd decided to fall in love with the first girl I met. You were that woman. Shall I go on? I don't believe in chance. I needed that break-up to meet you. I could've gone by earlier, or across the street.... Why didn't we meet sooner...a month, a year... We cruised the same areas.... I think life the passage of time, take care of the job of pulling people together or apart. I don't do any thing.I let time do it. Why should I do someone else's job?"