sarma

In this section we ask artists to tell us about their ‘reservoir’, the sources of inspiration on which they draw in the course of their working process. In this respect, we Europeans naturally think of a library or music or video collection. But the New Zealand performance artist Kate McIntosh immediately turns this typically ‘Western’ idea literally upside down.

New Zealand is a ‘wild place’, an isolated island. When you are there you feel you are ‘far away’, but also that the world was not made solely for the benefit of man. There are storms, a harsh sun, and a lot of wind. It is very green and it smells sweet. These natural surroundings were ‘my first library’. When I was nineteen I went to Australia to further my dance studies. My first job as a dancer was with Meryl Tankard, who had worked with Pina Bausch for many years. After growing up in and with the mystery of nature, this put me in contact with the mystery of culture, where Europe was the source of an old magical energy that is expressed in art. I had previously travelled, with my parents, and had visited Europe several times as a child: Greece, Rome, places like that. This confrontation made a great impression on me. Even then I was starting to realise that by staying in various places in the world it was possible to develop yourself into a variety of people or personalities. This notion of transformation or metamorphosis has become the main focus of my work and in a certain sense is linked even more to the world of culture than that of nature. Both my parents were scientists: molecular biology, genetics, neurotransmission and so on. They researched into how our brain communicates with the body. Their work and the conversations I had with them about it had a major influence on my way of thinking as I grew older. I understood while very young and in an organic way what research is, that one can enter into research oneself and that this sort of research process is actually an artistic one: you propose something that might be ‘true’ and then you test it out to see if it’s actually correct. At the end of a tour with Meryl Tankard I stayed in Europe. For some time I travelled between and worked in the two hemispheres -- Northern and Southern. If you are always living in different places, you lose your own history. You have to reconstruct yourself again and that gives you the opportunity to make changes to yourself. It’s because you always want to be understood by the people around you, but in these foreign places you meet people who have not seen you growing up. So in each place you have to rediscover how to behave culturally to enable these unfamiliar people to understand who you actually are. To do this you constantly have to ask yourself the question ‘So who am I?’ I have lived in Brussels for six years now – I have never previously stayed in one place for so long. This is probably the only place in Europe where I might be able to develop some kind of ‘rootedness’. I can look around me here and understand almost everything that’s going on. I am attracted by the gigantic crossover effect you experience in Brussels. It is so fascinating that here on a daily level artists from different disciplines like dance and visual arts will exchange conversation about each other’s work process. I like the chaos of Brussels. The double street names, the dug-up streets, the fact that nothing works, that it’s dirty, that no one can say exactly what the rules are (and if they were able to say anything about it they wouldn’t know which language to do it in): I experience all this as positive for my work.

My one source of sadness is the lack of nature here. In Europe nature is domesticated and I feel strange in it. But I would probably have the same feeling if I were in a South American jungle.
I also have the sort of ‘reservoir’ you have in mind. I have actually stopped reading fiction recently. When I read literature I am drawn into the imaginary space the book creates: as if I stopped being myself, and sometimes with a sort of inner discomfort, as if I had eaten something that didn’t agree with me. One book I have read over and over again is Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity: he makes a whole lot of connections between various subjects and fully admits that they are highly personal and subjective. When I was working on my solo show All natural I did a lot of research into stand-up comedians: I read pieces by and about Andy Kaufman and watched videos of Tommy Cooper. At the same time I started reading about the architecture of Las Vegas: those fragmented buildings that are built as traps. In fact my library consists of things I come across by chance. I don’t attach much importance to the ‘authority’ of information; I am not interested in whether the source is correct or not. I’m fascinated mainly by the way people live and how they collect bits and pieces of information in the course of their lives. It doesn’t matter whether this information is right or not: they live with it and through it and weave their world with it. That’s why I also often read newspaper articles about people who have bizarre interests. I try to talk to as many people as possible. I like the fragility of this sort of ‘amateurish’ knowledge: you pick up something you hear and if it ‘works’ for you it’s OK. I listen to a lot of music and watch a lot of films but never systematically. I read a lot about films too: for instance two books of interviews, one with David Lynch and another with Werner Herzog. We often watched Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man while working on Hair from the Throat. And the conversations between Herzog and Klaus Kinski too. I always feel a little uncomfortable with the authority or purity of things like pure philosophy or the music of Bach. I can certainly feel their energy and purity, and be impressed by it, but it’s actually too intense for me and I don’t know how to connect it to the world I consider to be ‘reality’. I look for a homemade mixture of things – bits and pieces that are very personal and contain plenty of humour – and for the fragility of failure and the imperfect. I do understand those perfect conceptual works, like Bach’s music, but they scare me a little. I am attracted by the warmth of a group like Forced Entertainment. Tim Etchells himself inspires me too as a writer. Another revelation was the work of Romeo Castellucci.

But nature remains my greatest source of inspiration, not just animals but landscapes too. I see it as fundamental that there are many different ways of living and that the way mankind tackles it today is not the only possibility. My nomadic life has convinced me that human life as it is organised today is not inevitable. That is what is so fascinating about watching animals. If you look into a chicken’s eyes you see the energy, that absolute faith in ‘chickenness’ and in the fact that it is good. It’s inspiring because it explodes the notion that only one way of living and only one culture is ‘correct’. In fact my work is made up of ‘attempts at being’. Trying things out, being flexible, not losing sight of yourself, finding out what’s possible. At present, living in the Northern hemisphere, when I look at the moon, in my view it’s actually upside down, while the people around me think that’s perfectly normal. I am interested by all those situations where ‘the moon is upside down’, both on a micro and a macro level.