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elive or remember something i had performed myself in 1995, in Dresden.
So i began to work on that, for a collaborative online project steered by W=
ill Self, the writer, and to be on-lined at the BBCThe Space, under the wor=
king title
"Kafka's Wound" which by itself was inspired by Kafka's morose short story =
"Ein Landarzt" (A Countrydoctor).  In fact, the most bizarre thing happened=
 when
at the end of the project a doc film team showed up at my door wanting to i=
nterview me and film me close up about that wound that i had treated in tha=
t KAKFA collaboration. So I showed them my wound/scar.

Yet, they did not make much of it in their doc, and just as well, as i thin=
k that wound is private after all, and the camera didn't quite get it. (you=
 know the stories about the photographers and the ghosts).

For the remainder of this week, while i am on here, i shall perhaps be movi=
ng between Kafka, that wound in that story, my memories of performing anoth=
er wound (purely in performance, real space not virtual) and a dedication t=
o my mother's death (my mother was well and alive in  1995) in the spirit o=
f the D=EDa de los muertos, and all are with us, the living and the dead, s=
o my own dead living being as well there in that ruined ruin in Hellerau. O=
ur performance then was called "Parsifal" and i had two performance roles, =
that of Amfortas (dying of a wound) and my mother (Kundry).  naturally, it =
was an absurd proposition, but ok, in the spirit of a silent opera. We did =
not use Wagner's music.

So i might refer to this in a cross patching with this other film I watched=
 by accident on that beforementioned Tuesday night when I walked home in th=
e rain, un-expecting to see on Channel 4 in the Uk the "Artist is Present" =
film on Marina Abramovic.

Someone (i think Abramovic) in this film says:  ""the hardest thing to do i=
s the thing that is closest to nothing" =20

Then the filmmaker of that film (Matthew Akers)  says:  "oh, now how do you=
 film that.
it is a challenge to every one to be present, to slow down, to stop, and ha=
ve a genuine connection with another human being."

I became very interested and obsessed with this documentary on Tuesday nigh=
t after i had walked home, for no apparent reason. I hated every minute of =
these false tears and faked emotions, and the curators and experts standing=
 there moved and choked.

And yet, looking back to the earlier years of this body art and live art er=
a, the 1970s, even the 80s, i tended to believe them that it was real, not =
theatre. I was younger and impressionable back then.=20

So here is Abramovic in 1990:(cited from http://www.jca-online.com/abramovi=
c.htmlmarina abramovic)

>>
Paris, June 1990

B.G.:  : To introduce your current work, may I say that after you had been =
questioning the body in the mid-seventies, you are now more involved in lis=
tening to its answer, to its word?=20

Marina Abramovic: Actually, my area of interest is no longer in testing the=
 body, like I and everybody else did during the body art movement of the se=
venties, which had a lot to do with pain and injuriousness in order to push=
 the body to its border, even to the border between life and death. Later o=
n there was a very interesting moment, when, at the beginning of the eighti=
es, many artists stopped performing. That was a crucial point for me becaus=
e, although they went back to painting, the symbols and gestures of perform=
ance were present in their new work. This is especially true for the Italia=
ns, like Clemente or Chia.

I asked some of them why they stopped performing, and the main answer was t=
hat it implied too much energy, that they could not deal with it. They need=
ed more privacy, the security of the studio . . . and that was exactly the =
point where I did not want to stop [smiling].=20

But as Ulay and I had exhausted our possibilities in art, physically, and a=
s we would not repeat our performances because we had never repeated anythi=
ng, the only answer we could look for was in nature. We would expose oursel=
ves to the most difficult circumstances. From our point of view we could fi=
nd those circumstances in the high temperatures. We explored four deserts w=
hich may have influenced our work a lot, the Gobi desert, the Taar desert, =
the Sahara, and the Central Australian desert.

So my new work is based on the idea that what is important is less what you=
 do than the state of mind you do it in. Then you must make enormous effort=
s to come to that state of mind. According to this, my new work deals with =
emptying my body: =93Boat emptying, stream entering.=94 This means that you=
 have to empty the body/boat to the point where you can really be connected=
 with the fields of energy around you.=20

>>

regards
Johannes Birringer