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As with Waiting for you, Sewn too was inspired by the morning meditation sessions with my then 9-year-old son Luca. We used to sit in front of one another and breathe in silence. Sometimes we opened our eyes and anchored our attention onto each other's eyes.
For this variation, I invited the sitter to choose a colourful thread which I then sewed between our t-shirts. After some time, I offered the sitter a pair of scissors, so that s/he cut the thread connecting us. Upon leaving, the sitter and I kept half thread hanging from the t-shirt, tangible trace of our time spent together. At the end of the performance my t-shirt was full of many colourful threads from all the encounters that had taken place. The encounter with the audience was always twofold: a one-to-one, silent and quiet, privileged in the intimate space of a straw mat surrounded by a string of fragrant jasmine buds, whilst the other consisted of a fluid crowd watching the first. Little India - where I used to live and where the performance art event took place - is always packed with foreign workers, mostly from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. I decided to present my performance outside the art space, to give the opportunity to witness and/or to be part of the performance to anyone, thus opening it also to a non-artsy crowd. To become relevant and stop being self-referential, art can - maybe must - leave the institutional spaces to become open to all: this could happen naturally bringing art to public spaces. |
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Jennie Klein, PhD, on Sewn #1 by Daniela Beltrani in "Implicated Audiences: FOI and Performing a/n/other Singapore."
