Zierle & Carter - UK/Germany - IPA - International Performance Association

Interdisciplinary, multi-sensory and often site and context responsive, Alexandra Zierle (DE) & Paul Carter’s (UK) practice spans performance, photography, sound, video and installation, with a strong emphasis on exploring intuition, presence and the ‘fabric of now’, material and process-led approaches, and anchoring iconic and memorable ‘live images’.

As a couple in life since 2005 and in art from 2006, Alexandra and Paul met in the UK in Cornwall on the BA(Hons) Fine Art course at Falmouth College of Arts in 2003 and began working together with performance towards the end of their undergraduate studies with a pivotal collaboration entitled Back to Back, in which the artists intensively explored their relationship through a black suit sewn back to back. Their professional career began just after graduating when Alexandra and Paul travelled to Patagonian Argentina/Chile and Buenos Aires with the Ferdinand Zweig Memorial Scholarship, where they made a number of site specific performances, performance based videos, an interview series on sense of belonging, and sound installations.

Throughout their collaborative practice UK based Zierle & Carter have been critically examining different modes of communication and what it means to be human, addressing notions of belonging, dynamics within relationships, and the transformation of limitations. Their work sites an embodied investigation into human interactions and encounters, acting as an invitation to venture into the spaces in-between the external and internal, permanent and transient, spoken and unheard. The work fundamentally explores society’s conventions, traditions, and rituals, often flipping them on their head, reversing orders, and disrupting the norm.

With a material and process led approach, their work continuously shifts in format, content and duration, from a series of short actions to three days durational works, a week long intensive, to bodies of work and research that span a year. At times publicly visible and others remote and discreet, their site-specific work has occupied galleries, explored one to one interactive and instruction based performances in cupboards and empty cinemas. They have created performance for camera works on snow covered mountain plateaus and at the edge of cliffs, performed a series of actions and interactions in busy shopping areas, baroque gardens and city parks, made process-led works in libraries, woodlands, tunnels and World War 2 bunkers, as well as working nomadically with interventions in wilderness such as on the top of a volcano, at the base of a glacier, in a hot spring and in deserts.

Their work has been widely exhibited internationally throughout Europe, Canada, United States, South America, Australia, in Asia and Africa, including Catalyst Arts (UK), Grace Exhibition Space (US), Venice International Performance Art Week (IT), IBT13 International Festival of Performance (UK), Substation for R.I.T.E.S. (SG), Defibrillator Gallery for Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival (US), 8. Biennale of Photography in Poznan (PL), Chapter Arts Centre for Experimentica (UK), IKRA (SE), Balikitan (PH), POP Gallery (AU), Garden of Reason (UK), IMAF International Performance Art Festival (RS), Up To Nature International Festival (UK), Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange (UK), La Galleria (UK), The Taubman Museum of Art (US), The A-Foundation for the Liverpool Biennale (UK), Federation Square (AU), Arnolfini for What next for the body? as part of In Between Time Festival (UK), Gallery of Contemporary Art Yaoundé (CM), Wysing Arts Centre (UK), Exist-ence International Performance Art Festival (AU), Zonadeartenacción- Foto y Video Acción (AR), Contaminate International Festival (US), and at MOMA (US) and Plymouth Arts Centre (UK) as part of Marina Abramovic’s Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art and The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow.

Twice recipients of Arts Council England grants, including support for the What has love got to do with it? visual arts residency in the Canadian Rocky Mountains at the Banff Centre. Their latest Arts Council funded project took the artists to Australia for their project Between Lands – A Sense of Belonging Enquiry, entailing a 6 week research and development residency with Melbourne based Chamber Made Opera. This research trip marked the launch of their latest enquiry into sense of belonging and specifically investigated facets and expressions of cultural identity and belonging through the lens and context of Australia. Working in the community, Zierle & Carter connected with various people from different ethnic backgrounds through discussions and informal interviews, exploring the intricacies of Australia’s native people and the long history of migrant settlers and refugees, bringing to question notions of ‘home’ and sense of belonging. From this research Zierle & Carter created Between Lands and Longings - a live art ‘Living Room Opera’ co-commissioned In Between Time and Chamber Made Opera, which premiered in the UK and Australia.

Zierle & Carter’s performance for camera piece Encounter – The Arrival won the audience award at the Exeter Contemporary Open 2011 and their work is featured in ‘Personal Structures Time – Space – Existence’ from The Global Art Affairs Foundation and Manuel Vason’s new Double Exposures publication co-published by Intellect and LADA, released later this year. Currently, they are In Between Time Associate Artists and were formerly Wysing Arts Centre Escalator Artists, members of the Newlyn Society of Artists (NSA), core members of The Western Alliance, and members of ‘Performing Curation’ a group convened by the Live Art Development Agency. In their capacity as curators and project managers, they have organized a number of performance platforms, notably as directors of Live Art Falmouth, a major international Live Art Festival in the UK in 2008. With The Western Alliance they co-organised the URGENCY/AGENCY Residency in Istanbul and Cornwall as part of the Visiting Arts Artists to Artist scheme.

In an academic capacity, Zierle & Carter are currently Visiting Lecturers for Falmouth University (UK) and previously have worked as Visiting Lecturers for the School of Art Institute of Chicago (US), Swefi in Happaranda (SE), VCA in Melbourne (AU), Ferrum University in Roanoke (US) and Dartington College of Arts (UK). They have led workshops nationally and internationally, including At the Edge of the Land, of Practice and of Knowing, a Live Art Development Agency DIY9 workshop in Cornwall, UK. As consultants, the artists also help other artists with funding applications and have been mentors for Arts Council England funded projects.

This year sites a number of new commissions, performances, and workshops including a new collaboration with Nicola Canavan for her Artsadmin Bursary, invited as guest lecturers on the ‘Resistance’ PAStudies in Kaunas in Lithuania, performing at the CREATurE Live Art Festival, a performance at CIPAF (Cyprus International Performance Art Festival) in Greece, performing for the ‘Feeling Queezy?!’ exhibition at The Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia in Tallinn, making work at ‘Art Now Live Tour’ in Beijing, China, and a performance at SAVVY Berlin, in addition to invites to Chile for the Deformes Biennale, Brazil for p.ARTE and a residency and performance in Oaxaca, Mexico.

http://www.zierlecarterliveart.com/

Themes explored: material-led processes, embodiment/presence, body memory, process based explorations, introspection, authenticity, transformation, liminality, sensory awareness/perception, intuition, archetypes, collaboration, idea generation, the ‘every day’ and ritualised actions, duration, direct audience interactions and other less common performance structures/strategies. We will share with you our wide range of experiences and personal perspectives on performance art through a highly experiential exploration of our working methods from our personal toolbox: Here we find a number of physical and mental processes and experiments, statements and beliefs that have helped us to expand, deepen our practice, and have continuously lead us into new territories again and again. Key points of the workshop:

We will look at the more visible components of a performance practice, such as the body, time/duration, space, materials and objects, as well as explore the more hidden components, such as intention, emotions, inner senses, intuition, focus and visioning.
We will explore mind-body centring exercises as well as some body-space perception exercises as methods of arriving into a place of enhanced embodiment and presence and as preparation for the process and material led approaches.
We will experiment extensively with material led processes that will lead us into an intimate dialogue with any chosen material/object and will give us the ability to explore its essence, letting it guide our actions and allowing us to really listen to what qualities captivate us and want to be expressed through us. Through this journey the materials/objects can become an extension of our bodies and we are able to put aside our conventional societal and cultural filters and find new meanings/experiences.

What does it take to step into dialogue with a wall, a cooking pot, your dinner plate, a bag of rubble, a tree or an entire city?

We will investigate the ‘fabric of things’ (materials/objects/space) through methods that will develop our sensitivity and ability to fine-tune our five senses individually.
We will learn how to switch off the intellect, the critic, the logical mind, to welcome intuition as an ally and guide, opening a space for raw, authentic poetic actions, and finding a balance between instinctive and rational inspired thinking.
We will share a series of highly practical creative and devising processes that can be used both in solo work as well as in collaborative work beyond the workshop.
We will explore a wide band of methodologies and performance models/structures/forms including one to one interactions, social sculptures, interventions, within the frame work of solo and group performances.
Together as a group, we will seek out spaces that metaphorically lay ‘in between’ – liminal spaces, no mans lands, borderlines, thresholds and edges. Here we will encounter the territory of the trickster and the fool, two archetypes that we will explore through experimental exercises and see how they can influence our work as artists.
We will delve into exploring ‘site’, both as the location where the work resides and also as the source for the work, exploring different methods of investigation to create site specific performances.
At times we will let ‘the wolves’ go to town to ‘scavenge’ for materials, places and spaces, encounters, questions, and conversations that will feed into our performances.
We will introduce methods of personal reflection throughout the workshop through experimental forms of documentation and record keeping.

Other aspects we will explore: The body as canvass - Alchemical processes and symbolism - Shape-shifting as performance practice - The terror and fascination of encountering otherness – The sculptural language and aesthetics of performance – The sublime and profane – The fabric of the every day – Dynamic provocations - Actions and their ripple effect – Traces left behind - How do you treat your audience? - Humour and sincerity - Reversing orders and turning things inside out – How to arrive at meaningful questions? There will be plenty of time to work on developing your performances and your individual visual/action-based vocabulary in a supportive and critical environment, with artistic and logistical feedback from us and from the group, with technical support where possible. As facilitators, we will aim to both challenge and support participants to tease out the best in their work. There will be time to witness, discuss, reflect and critique each other’s work. As this is a predominantly experientially focused workshop, based on first hand embodied experience, we will keep the theoretical studies to a minimum, yet contextualise where necessary. At times we will work dynamically, intensively and will undoubtedly at points reach our limits, which will be balanced with gentle and introspective exercises. We will follow and respond to the specific group dynamics and the particular interests of the participants, so all is not set in stone. All these experiments, exercises/games, assignments, and discussions will lead you to develop your own individual work as well as participating in collaborative performances with fellow artists. This workshop will suit all levels of practice/performance experience. Our intention with this workshop is to create a temporal hub of experimentation, a supportive space for risk taking, and parameter shifting, different from those known and familiar. Though brief, we hope that the group convened will have a lasting life and effect outside of this specific locale and context and create a peer supportive community of like minds. On a more practical note: Please bring some materials that you would like to work with. Materials could include anything, they can be domestic, found, bought, throw away, multiples, large, small, man made, natural and/or personally significant items. Please be aware that we will work with them in an investigative transformative way, which almost certainly will decompose, deconstruct, and reassemble your material/object at some stage during the workshop. Please bring a blanket and small cushion, an inquisitive mind and a sense of humour. Some insights into our personal Performance Beliefs, Ethics and Philosophies For us, Performance Art is a shared extraordinary moment only fully experienced in the here and now. A moment made of many facets of realities, blurring the boundaries between life and art. It is a 'vessel' that frames, holds, marks and brackets an experience wherein anything can and does happen, where boundaries are traversed, portals are opened, where spaces, places and peopled are bridged. It inhabits the live 'collective' moment, demanding presence, aliveness and self-reflection from all 'participants' there and then. It is a 'space' to go somewhere else, to meet afresh, to re-envisage ourselves and our world, to journey to the edge of social, cultural, mental, emotional and physical boundaries. To experience Performance art is to experience the edge of knowing: to depart and to arrive, to collectively meet bare and stripped in the wash of infinite moments. In many respects our intentions in performance are the same as in life; we intend to have heartfelt, sincere, poignant, challenging, memorable and transformative experiences with people. One of our main intentions is to communicate beyond what could be expressed through purely visual, spoken or written language. We are interested in people having embodied (in and from the body) ‘in the moment’ experiences and responses, absorbing and connecting with the work on multiple levels, rather than analysing it purely through intellect or mediating it through socially conditioned filters. We invite people to leave their rational minds on the backseat, to extend themselves beyond the familiar self-defined constructs, and take a leap into the unknown. We are less interested in communicating our beliefs and manifestos, big ideas and grand statements, instead we are trying to plant an invitation for people to confront, reassess, question, reflect, meditate, and take action upon issues that they hold close to them. A potential catalyst for change as it were. We are not interested in providing answers, people bring their own histories and filters to their reading, instead we intend to immerse ourselves completely within these new scenarios in order to unearth and surface with poignant questions. We intentionally construct scenarios without the need to entirely understand the full nature of it, that is not to say that we haven’t done informed research or given it enough thought, on the contrary we have, it is rather that we follow our intuitive sense more, if there is something potent here for us to unearth but we don’t yet need to know what or how. This has to be embodied and must come from the lived experience. The understanding must come through the experience of the action or process itself. In performance, the live moment is something we can guide and frame though we cannot control; it is a living breathing entity. Our bodies are vehicles for expression, vehicles to communicate and to explore and navigate the world through the five senses. More than that to us, our bodies are a vessel for record keeping, shaped and conditioned through life and personal experiences as well as the shared experiences in performances. As our bodies have various abilities to shape and manipulate the material world around us and reach out in gestures and actions, we work in direct connection with and through our bodies, exploring a deeper and more refined connection with each single cell of our bodies through the embodiment of actions and life as such. But the challenge for us is not to over-identify with our bodies, knowing that we are so much more than our physical bodies, they are our instruments, but not the players. Questioning the body is questioning our physical existence in the world, as we are constantly changing and expanding mentally and emotionally our relationship with our body changes also, so if there’s anything that is constant in life, then it is the on-going process of finding new questions and provoking new experiences.

Zygmunt Piotrowski, Poland

Zbigniew Warpechowski, Poland

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