A Discussion between Uta Nusser and Claire Waffel 4/4
U.N.
In your "Please Read" project in Berlin and London from April and May 2007 you are once again creating direct connections between people, bringing strangers into personal contact with one another. This was achieved by leaving letters bearing an invitation in public spaces, a direct mail so to speak without using the post. What was the response to your undertaking in Berlin and London and what was the outcome of the subsequent performance in Clärchen's Ballhaus?
C.W.
I carried out the project several times. The first time I was very curious about how many and what kind of people would take up my anonymous invitation. I waited in front of the ballroom for people holding my envelopes with "Please Read" written on them. Among them was an old friend, who I had not seen for six years. We stood somewhat surprised, skeptical and a little bit embarrassed in front of each other. I asked myself whether we would have otherwise run into each other in Berlin, as both of us had no idea that we were living in the same city. On this evening we inaugurated a post box. The idea behind it was that anyone could post an anonymous letter into the box and at the same time take with and read any letters found inside it. The post box was removed after three weeks. The next time I carried out this project in London, a curious man appeared who felt compelled to find out what would happen at the place of my invitation. I do not know whether he was disappointed when he found out that no camera team was waiting for him. For the third performance of this project, I was sitting inside a Berlin ballroom while a friend welcomed the letter recipients outside, according to my instructions. Everyone was asked to sit alone at a table and communicate by letter with each other. I was not prepared for the dynamics, which developed out of this situation, and I was faced with the challenge of having to stage and direct the events like a theater director. After one and a half hours I asked the participants to hand me their letters and we all went our separate ways. What was very intriguing to see was that we were very quickly able to build up quite intimate and close connections with each other through this form of communication. My intention for this performance was not to initiate friendships, but rather to communicate in a very personal way with strangers for a set amount of time.
U.N.
Finally I would like to raise another genre: the pencil drawings, which recently started appearing in your artistic repertoire. With the new drawings I once again detect a thematic link with your other pieces of work, as the same spatial-temporal parallels, shifts and linkages can be found. "Benja's Dream" from 2007 depicts a dream taken out of real time of a woman who appears time-less. The woman - in reversal of puppet theater conventions - is having her strings pulled simultaneously by seven puppet-like actors. As well as a role reversal, there is a reversal of space and time. By this I am referring to a spatial reversal of up and down, as normally you expect one puppeteer who is above the stage and controls the string of several puppets from there. In this case, however, a woman is displaced into the realms of dreams and fantasy by smaller puppet-like creatures, among whom are some hybrids from the human world and animal kingdom. At the same time there is a reversal of time, as the actors have taken on a child-like appearance and are leading the grown-ups back to their childhoods. In the drawing "Wald" from 2007 we encounter a girl, lost in a forest, who seems to live in several parallel worlds, which are characterised by spatial jumps in dimensions. The vertical tree trunks and the horizontally arranged brushwood branches, which from a formal point of view form a sort of web or net, are the connecting elements here. A similar overturning of space and time is discernible in the theatrically moonlit "Schauplatz" from 2007. A rope running across the picture serves to set the boundaries and connections of the various spatial and time layers. The rope is being held by a middle-aged man, who is leading a deer by its antlers. While the deer is humbly bowing its head towards a sleeping girl who is stretched out on the ground. I see in this depiction a reversal and fusion of day and night: a daylight foreground with a sleeping figure and awake wanderers in a dark nighttime background. Moreover, the main protagonists, the sleeping girl in her underwear and the correctly dressed man in his suit, shirt and tie, stand in contrast to each other, as do the nocturnal and daytime animals - a deer here, an owl there and the vampire-like bats - which appear at the same time. The whole scene is dominated by a surreal mood, in which light and shadow, day and night, nature and humankind, dream and reality, the real and the illusory encounter and become connected with each other.
A correspondence of letters between Uta Nusser and Claire Waffel,
Stuttgart-Berlin, July and August 2008
Uta Nusser born 1941, lives in Stuttgart studied Linguistics, French and English,
until 2001 curator of the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart,
editor of monographs on John Hilliard, Jean-Louis Garnell, Graigie Horsfield a.o.
since 2002 she has worked as a freelance translator, editor and author