leDordszine is a free non-monthly magazine where we perform life in the hopes of bringing you joy, light and laughs in the day you open it.
claims for own existence
Time slips away from my hands time and time again. Within its extraordinarily slimey body I am constantly unable to grip it. I never have time to find the time. Not because I have to work many jobs to survive, I don't, my part-time job is enough. But because I have a lot I want to make that must be conciliated with work. I have the profound privilege of being where I now am, of making more than half of my life the making of art. It thrusts through every dimension of my visibly fatigued body and trembling right eye, full of conjunctivitis, hectically knocks me down, it occupies me, completely consumes my whole being, it is for whom I work and the one for which I must sustain myself. I must work to sustain her**: my own occupation.
Occupation, as opposed to labor, needn't a final product or a conclusion, it relies upon the process itself without a temporal framework [1]. Occupation in art encompasses the time of making art: “time spent in studio or in practice, dedicated to the production of art objects, performances, or other kinds of work”. Often romanticised and seen as intense, sublime, passionate and desirable. But it also, includes "…the mundane assembly of the necessary tools, materials and artefacts, the work of thinking, preparing and planning, the quotidian and repetitive dimensions of art production" [2].
About two months ago, I moved in with my childhood friend, Nelson, to what we now call le Dords . Since then I have been nurturing the house everyday, creating small winter nests at each corner. The house was very empty and hostile at first, so much so that on the first day we got it, we laid on the floor and cried after the emotional rollercoaster which was finding it. It took almost three full months of consistent hard work to get a house, as there is a serious housing crisis in the Netherlands. We sent our curriculums vitae to landlords.
I have been gathering resources in online reselling platforms who are called marktplaats. I have been walking in the neighbourhood, hunting for treasures: 1 shampoo holder, 3 perfectly shiny mugs and 1 ugly glass cup I found next to the normal trash; before that a fatboy and blue chair defeated by its own life. I have been cutting wood as a meditative practice and making furniture from it every week. Like I said I have a lot I want to make and never enough time. Therefore, I decided to stop trying to engage in passionate art practices and just start documenting the mundane constantly. To make the living, building, domestic, moving-house tasks become the art, to perform my life and share the process as the art itself rather than having individual final products.
This is not new, during the avant-garde, artists set out to break the barriers of art and to recreate its relation to life. What used to materialise exclusively as object or product, now tends to appear as activity or performance. They turned the making of art into the commodity itself [1].
This idea of selling myself is also not new to me, I have always done it at my job or to get any job. Partaking in rituals of agile self-improvement methodologies, getting certificates of this and that, going to conferences, beautifying and upgrading, to become more and more desirable for companies. Life feels to me like a constant performance “subsumed under the rules of efficiency and optimisation that were first encountered under the regime of automated industrial work” [3].
“Since we're condemned to have a future, we re condemned to work, and at the same time, if you are condemned to work. you are condemned to have a future. (...) If you want to avoid work, you have to work as hard because you have to find a way, you have to have a plan, a strategy." [3] The incapability of just existing is exhausting, every moment of our lives we are working. As I scroll through instragram, a natural-wooden-sutstainable-environmentally-climate-and-animal-friendly-three-years-garanteed toothbrush ad comes up, and unwillingly but also a bit willingly I executed free instant labor.
I realised in the past months (through the cliché of walking the camino de santiago), that what makes me happier is to love the ones around me and feel loved, by just myself and then additionally by others. We want this house to be love. Not a house, a Home. We want to feel like children and play, to be a child once again and give that back to others. We want the house to be an art studio where we live, not a house with an art studio. But not a studio where we go and make art, we want the studio and our lives to be one, to be the art itself. That is my strategy, our plan. I cannot get out of the loop of working and I don't have the time to make. I accept it then, I want to make the work of living, the performance that is living, the art. The name is le Dordszine, a magazine where we share a little bit of our life with you, to bring you joy, hopefully a lot of laughs, to bring a bit of light into the day you open this (day and month tbd), to love you.
Anything we want to share can go in this magazine, any sort of art, essays, opinions, rants, or maybe you have something you want to share here yourself. Feel free! Let us know.
So, without further a due, welcome to the first edition of le Dordszine ! In the next one I will ask Nelson to write something better.
Love,
Mariana
[1] H. Steyerl, Art as occupation: Claims for an autonomy of life, Journal #30 December 2011, e-flux;
[2] Serafini, P. and Banks. M., Living Precarious Lives? Time and Temporality in Visual Arts Careers, Culture Unbound, Volume 12, issue X, 2020.
[3] Kunst B., Artist at work, proximity of art and capitalism, Zero Books, Winchester e 2015
[4] ashleyiamd, Reading Response - Hito Steyerl “Art As Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life”, A Graduate Seminar at OCAD University, Summer 2015