If I were to try to describe the path that led me to create Treibgut, I’d go for the most intense moments of my life.
Nature in the night, noises, smells, enormous shapes shifting moving in the wind, the strange apparition of the forms of the world in the mist, the indescribable exuberance of morning after a fresh snowfall. The intense joy of giving life to a human being. Or facing death, unable to understand how a familiar body could become something foreign, separated from what I’d call its true presence, the body become a mere thing. The perception of life, the breath that traverses and unites all things, discovering love, feeling death – that piercing presence – being part of that “whole”, of that “being”.
I came from stage space. And now I was entering a phase of work on silence, in silence. – impelled by the desire to move deeper into my intimate personal spaces and thence to open up to inner spaces vaster and ever more vast. A solitary travail, with a fine pen and Chinese ink on paper. The movement which unfolded spontaneously on my blank pages – often withdrawing infinitely far – one day returned to me, leaving the world of the imagination and becoming embodied. The damp drawing paper rose in folds under my fingers. Dried and suspended from wires, there was the mobile sculpture. Expanded to 8 m x 16 m – suspended – it ripped apart the visual space of the Chapelle des Brigittines (Brussels) creating a reality both surprising and liberating, yet awesome in relation to man, whom it dwarfed. This pace attracted me, with its charge of history. And into it I projected the mobile sculpture which took on protean forms.
Treibgut – adrift – drawn, swept, blown, driven… carrying, dragging… The theme unfolded into a dramaturgy of space, it reached out for meaning: more than a mere exhibition (Chinese ink drawings, sculpture-structure) – a happening. The sculpture was set in motion, entered into union with music and with dance: Confronting matter – the mobile sculpture, now a protagonist – with man the dancer and with music, inscribed in space, in light, in time.%@%
Treibgut grew into a project: work in progress. The very special space of the Chapelle des Brigittines may be considered as the matrix of this project, which does not, of course, exclude the possibility of drifting, as the title suggests, towards other shores, other places of inspiration or of provocation. The project has been enriched, the movement enhanced, by exchanges with various collaborators – choreographer-dancer, musician, technicians – not just playing at Treibgut, being it, living it out.
Thus the social sculpture develops and thrives, through the very dynamic of the work, an ongoing interaction between « me » and « the other ».
In the spectacle-performances of the Treibgut cycle, my purpose is to create an experiential space, a complex, vital event that acts directly on our senses, leading to the perception of an open world, a metamorphosis that transcends borders. To create inner images, a form of memory that opens up onto the future.