WIND BETWEEN THE LEAVES - Free thoughts on Zai Kuning's "Loosing oneself to be with it and taken away by it"
Text by Francesco Kiais
© All photographs by: Monika Sobczak | Zai Kuning, Loosing oneself to be with it and taken away by it. 2nd Venice International Performance Art Week 2014
Elements of visual orientation
At the centre of the large rectangular perimeter of Palazzo Mora's main hall, Singapore-based artist Zai Kuning has suspended an oval and smooth stone, at a short distance from the ground, half enmeshed in the net of a thick red wire, stretched in the space between the high ceiling and the floor.
Two boards of clear solid wood, lie on the ground not far from the suspended stone. Stuck into the wooden boards, four heavy knives. A small wooden bowl is placed under the stone and contains a smoking coal of plant material. Another wooden bowl, containing water, is placed on the side of one of the boards. On the floor lies a curved bamboo stick.
Limit and Release (Abandonment)
Zai Kuning marks paths of crossing, continuously passing from one side to the other of the stone. He plays with knives, hits them one with another and throws them down to stick into the wood, as if they were a natural extension of his gestures, as if he threw farther the limits of his acting, thinking and feeling.
He sprinkles the boards with water, makes turn the suspended stone around itself: the rotation axis of our emotional and sensorial space, brought outside of us, now runs along the red line, turning with the stone and repeating a cosmic phenomenon: the dance of planets and galaxies around themselves.
Zai stops, and emits a sound with his eyes closed, involving the whole body in this sound emission. It is a cry, or a recall, pushed from the belly through the chest, in the mouth. Even the hands and arms participate to push this lament, creating the fragile and unstable figure of a frail flourish.
The strength of the sound exceeds the fragility of the figure, which sways like a leaf in the wind, in front of the inexorable gravity of the stone, beside the weight of the objects. The abandoning/release of the self is underway. The liberating distance from the self is taken. Now, the person Zai is no longer in the presence of a limit: he becomes the happening and the crossing of it.
On the other side is the heart of our fears, the face of our temporary nature. It is an exorcism, for those who are witnessing. It is an experience of the limit with the latest metamorphosis, for the one who guides us in this journey.
Zai gives another rotation boost to the stone. The galaxies go on in their timeless dance.
Thirst and memory
The shamanic exorcism is related to the human metamorphosis in the scenery of a universe, which we no longer know how to philosophically embrace, and which we must again recognise starting from our physical limits, from our sensory boundaries, for to be able to comprehend it again.
The starting point of this performance is the moving in the proximity of an absence. It is a missed person, whose disappearance causes a sudden awareness of our being present, of being present "without".
These gestures made in proximity of an absence, make us consider that you're not present only for yourself. That there is no life without an end. That you must lovingly take the burden of responsibility of a memory, of a life, to give value also to your own presence in the world.
Life is thirst for the present, for the presence and for the presences. The audience itself is a gathering of presences. The present itself is a set of presences. Here is the performance space, here is the meaning of the ritual, here is where Zai, the shaman, leads us.
The form and the experience / The form is the experience
For those who stopped at the superficial aspect of this performance, the sacral ritualistic appearance in the traditional sense, expressed by Kuning in its full force, has definitely prevailed.
And this is natural, because the superficial appearance is actually by itself a vehicle full of meanings. It is language, carrier of content and generator of sense. It is metaphysical and physical extension of a way of thinking, of expressed and generated reality. It is a gesture deeply rooted in an archaic tradition.
But Zai does not exhibit the form in itself. It is our gaze that aestheticises the on-going lived drama. That which Zai offers in a radically archaic way, is the eloquence of gestures matured over centuries, which give a name to pain, absence, detachment, abandonment. The shamanic gesture does not mean to recite, it means to experience.
Wind between the leaves
The choice of tradition and the choice of transgression, in relation to the linguistic and formal conformism of the present, are equivalent, as breaking elements. Because today tradition does not mean cultural continuity but, on the contrary, memory of a path broken by an overwhelming and homologating cultural model.
In his last poem written in Friulian dialect, Pasolini urges the young Phaedrus with these words: "defend, conserve, pray,"1 namely: discover the substance in the forms of your own culture and defend it, preserve it through regenerating it. Give new meaning to the sacred, in a broader philosophical sense, in its humanistic matrix devoid of any god. Perform acts of faith toward our fragility and imperfection, to understand our limits and give back their beauty.
The transgressor/caretaker Zai, indicates the way toward a small temple, -as the transgressor/caretaker Pasolini, or like other transgressors/caretakers did in their turn-, and that is called, Person, Memory, Sharing. It is a place that is many places, an ensemble of basic needs that form the basis of every communitarian process and any language.
The question, then, is to be able to practice everyone's own identity, which is the bearer of a language that gains value in the comparison with other identities and languages. We have to express ourselves in different languages, dialects soaked with universality. We must cradle the idea of the Babel, in which we live, and that invites us to live in the difference. We must gather ourselves in rituals that celebrate this substance, being together and understand also from others how we perceive and interpret the world.
Defend, protect, pray. As in the case of the nomads, who Zai has approached in one of his projects,2 or in the case of the people who had to leave their land after a catastrophe,3 the temple, the school, the square, the law, all are within the individuals themselves, and move with them. Zai finds and creates small momentary communities, he finds us and he leaves us, like wind passing through the leaves.
NOTES
1 - Defend, conserve, pray: from "Greetings and good wishes", the last poem written in Friulian dialect by Pier Paolo Pasolini (In: The new youth, Einaudi, 1975).
2 - Zai Kuning has stayed years with the Orang Laut, nomadic indigenous fishermen living in the Riau Archipelago for his on-going research.
3 - More recently, Zai Kuning went to places where people were forced to abandon their homes after the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima-Daiichi and the subsequent tsunami, which generated another kind of nomadism, practiced not by choice, but by compulsion.
