Around Liminality: A Lecture on Transitions (2024)
Lecture on Transitions is a lecture-performance that explores the concept of liminality—in-between spaces or transitional moments that hold creative potential. In the work I consider the edges of experience where transformation occurs. Through examples from my own work—poetic interpretations of exterior happenings and others, like Bruce Nauman’s studio performances and Nono’s La Lontananza, I examine how the act of lingering in liminal spaces fosters a transition into a new way to think (or read, or perform).
Between 1967 and 1969, Bruce Nauman made a series of films of himself performing various mundane actions in his studio. These range from playing violin and pacing, bouncing a ball, stamping, and all of them usually include walking. In each of them the mundane becomes the subject. In the late 60s this kind of walking as performance art became fashionable—Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and others created works that incorporated some kind of walking. Lucy Lippard calls this the dematerialisation of the art object. kind of exploration of a threshold, both for the performer and, later, for the viewer.
Nauman’s works exemplify a transitory state with no clearly defined beginning or end. He walks the perimeter of his studio in an exaggerated fashion. In Lachenmann’s Toccatina for solo violin, the edges of sound are utilized as a microcosm of something that is 'almost.' The screw of the bow is used to create pitch, the hair of the bow is bowed everywhere but the strings. These sounds mostly associated with the ‘extraneous’ or on the perimeter, and without amplification, you may not even be able to hear the work.
