is it you or me?a relational art project

by Cristina Nuñez and Eva Marichalar Freixa

is it you or me?A relational art project by Cristina Nuñez and Eva Marichalar Freixa

Abstract

A woman in her 50’s arrives sets up a portable table and serves tea for two, waiting for someone to join her. Another woman in her 40’s walks the streets carrying a white bed-sheet, sweeping the ground with it and telling a childhood story. As an alternative to social networks they offer relational services in the street, such as genuine presence, conversation and story telling, to pro-voke interdependency instead of indifference.The two women will explore similar actions, in a team or individually, sometimes filming each other, or gathering people’s intimate stories on audio or video.

Objectives:

The project intends to foster human bonding, generating community through relational art and gather stories to tell. Its main idea is proving that the Women’s Lib mantra “the personal is political” is real.Telling our story and expressing our emotions also helps us to accept them and pass on to a different mood, but on the other hand we want to draw people’s attention on human inner life, because we feel that society does not give enough importance to this.People are afraid to share what is emotional. It is known that to be successful we should be positive and happy and show everyone that we are. Other emotions are considered negative or destructive. Through our public actions we would like to prove that being authentic and sharing feelings with others might help create union, connection with others, more profound and authentic relationships, more trust between people. In a greater scale, this means fostering dialogue to overcome conflicts that normally emerge, stimulating collaboration and peace.

About our team:

http://cristinanunez.com/ http://www.evamarichalarfreixa.com/

Nuñez is 53, Marichalar is 43. Nuñez works on visual arts, Marichalar on live performance. Our first encoun-ter happened one year ago. We passionately talked for hours, discovering a surprising series of coincidences, common views and grounds, which continue to emerge in time, despite the many differences. Since then we have been working on a project of public actions together.

While working together, we share our stories in an ongoing process. We explore all aspects of our relationship and think about it. We explore different ways of working. One talks to the other, one accompanies the other, one observes the other. This is how the artistic dialogue is built.

Range of possible actions:

Setting up a table serving tea or a cloth on the ground with organic healthy foods is the main action of hu-man warmth to invite others to join. Eva’s walk with her white sheet is another important action.Other actions, included in the previous, will certainly be:1. Real contact and connection.2. Human communication with unknown people.3. Facilitation of emotional expression.4. Storytelling: disclosure of her own intimate discourse, as if with close friends.5. Listening to people’s stories, inner struggles and intimate discourse.6. Taking pictures of people and reading emotions in their faces (based on Nuñez’s method of in-depth perception of images).

How things go…

In our experience in relational art, if you are patient, things happen in the most natural way. It can be that for a while nothing happens, everyone ignores my presence, but little by little, if we stay calm and in touch with ourselves and with the moment, things start to happen. It’s important to be available to be there for long peri-ods of time, in order to allow interesting things to happen, and when they do, it seems magic…

Here’s an example of two of our street performances. In our very first, we went to walk in the mountains. The goal was to practice my performances for my project La Vie en Rose, about the search for love. We were both scared to approach people in the street… It was a weekday so we knew that there wouldn’t be much people, but we tried anyway. We laid our picnic and started to eat and soon one man came walking by. We offered him some food or fruit, and he said he would come back later. We talked about how to approach people and I proposed to her that we couldn’t speak but with signs, and as soon as I said this, the same man returned. We were amazed, it was like magic. We danced and made some body movements. At first he thought we were crazy. He asked our names and we had to say them with signs. He guessed Eva but not Cristina. He then asked our professions and we replied with signs until he understood. We tried to guess his. I said he was a politician. He said no, he’s a teacher. But later he admitted he’s well into politics.

In the end I filmed him on interview about the issue of love, since I saw him as a potential partner. But talk-ing about this turned me off, I wasn’t interested in his views about love and life…Nevertheless it was quite astonishing that we would meet just one person, that he was willing to talk, he ac-cepted to be filmed, and that he could have been a potential partner.

After he left we elaborated what had happened, how we had felt, if we had managed to do what we wanted and what we would have liked to do or to provoke.In the end we realized that this practice could become a common project, and we planned the next move.w

Our second experience happened in the streets of Gracia neighborhood in Barcelona: it took quite a while to get someone to sit with us, eat and talk, but in the end a fantastic encounter took place…At the beginning, our idea was to lay a cloth on the ground with organic food and invite beggars and home-less people. We walked looking for them, asked one of them but he refused. We got hungry so we prepared our picnic on the steps of the market and started eating. First, there was general indifference. Sometimes someone would take a quick glance at us without saying hello. Then, a lady approached and we started to chat nicely. She didn’t sit with us, but she was friendly and warm. After a while, two men accepted to eat a couple of cherry tomatoes, smiled, said thanks, and left.

Suddenly I saw an old man on a big blue coat and a hat, walking by, who looked at me. I smiled at him and nodded as if saying, you can come over. He approached, sat down with us on the steps and started to talk. It came out that he was a homeless person. He didn’t seem so, because of his new coat. Eduardo was from Uru-guay, a furniture maker who escaped his country because his politically subversive activities had got him into trouble. In Spain, then a dictatorship, he managed to start a new life. He travelled around Europe, married, had a daughter whom he doesn’t see since her birth 30 years ago, and had lots of adventures of all sorts. He worked for many years, but he lost his job on the big crisis and he became homeless since then. He said he’s happy, he doesn’t like to be a slave of this society, he wants to be free to do what he pleases, he doesn’t care about having things or even a home. He has friends all around the city, and he’s never really hungry or too cold.

This encounter touched us deeply. We exchanged phone numbers (yes, he had a very basic mobile phone) and we promised to meet soon. We will meet during May 2016 for a new video encounter.

http://cristinanunez.com/http://www.evamarichalarfreixa.com/