24 minutes mini-DV video, two manipulated mechanical cuckoo clocks and wires

2011

I kept myself locked in for three days inside an empty house to force myself create a way read my script without using too much costumes. I found two toothbrushes in that empty house, and I used them as my ears to become a cat, and myself talking to the cat at once. I stage in that way with different toothbrushes or photocopies of toothbrushes, five conversations with myself as myself and as an animal. We speak about the difficulty of reading different philosophers and thinkers like Rousseau, Lyotard, Taussig and Multatuli. And also about the impossibility to dance slow, or to get a hug or a kiss when mostly needed for instance.

I then replaced the cuckoo clocks’ birds by my toothbrushes, and they do not really function as clocks anymore but as “entr’acte” signals, referring to a passage I plagiarized from Multatuli. In that passage he does not talk about colonization, but about writers’ faking the truth and using for instance a different hour in their text just to make the text sound better. 

I later added another layer of still images where I try an opposite approach of “making a mask’ by ridiculously painting myself and changing my costume to look respectively like each of the mentioned animals in the title of the work. I used some of them in between the conversations, and I censured the others.

This experiment results from states of being I faced while in the process of obtaining a Dutch permanent residency permit. This video never mentions the details of this process. On the contrary, it censures them and de-places them.

Finally, I am still in doubt whether this last information should be shared or censured. 

This work was produced with the support of FONDS BKVB, Red AIR residency and Tolhuistuin Residency in North Amsterdam between 2009 and 2011. 

Thanks for Kees Reedijk and the Rijksakademie.