Against Gravity Live Art Weekend: Interview with Catherine Borra

Against Gravity Weekend
Interview with curator Catherine Borra
ICA

Taking place over three days at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Against Gravity Live Weekend questioned how the artist is challenged by the need to represent the contemporary. Highly ambitious and diverse, the weekend featured performances, screenings, music and installations that brought disciplines at intellectual junctions and raised dialogues about the future of art in problematic cultural frameworks.

‘Against Gravity was not a thematic weekend, but a series of vectors with different propositions- different artists whose practices coincide and interact in various ways’, says young curator Catherine Borra. At the base of these intersections was the need to uncover the codes that shape contemporary art into such an esoteric practice. ‘Of course there’s a lot of conversations between artists that focus on positioning themselves in this esoteric art world. The big problem they identified was related to ties; ties that have to do with historical gravity, of art feeling the weight of previous art history’.

To some extent, was this about defining an underground movement, if such movement exists in London? ‘I hope so, not because I like the idea, but because I appreciate ideas that propose, that are sincere and energetic. I’m interested in the creative energy that can be used to make a work- it’s an approach, I think. And I think it’s still around, although sometimes the aesthetic of it takes more relevance than the actual creative ideas. I’m not interested in pretending to be revolutionary, I think sincerity is way more radical.’

The programme created refractions based on deliberate conceptual and physical intersections. Audiences coming to see a screening were met by a promenade performance, and those there for a gig had to pass through an art installation. ‘I invited lots of different people - a selection of artists, performers, musicians, curators- and lots of them interlock in some way. For example on the Saturday in Cinema Two we screened a video of Journeys End in Lovers Meetings, the music of which was composed by one of the musicians from HTRK. A curatorial approach that tried to integrate collaborators and make sure it crossed the public’. This intersection of artists, audiences and concepts created a critical, receptive audience sensitive to this conversation. As Catherine points out, ‘the situations that are created are quite interesting, because of their difference you not only experience them differently but perceive them in different models.’ So there was no segregation taking place. ‘I think it’s important to not segregate the audiences: the cinema one from the music from the theatre. That’s what London is missing, despite its great institutions- a merging of audiences.’

Yet the weekend went beyond segregation, into a formal dialogue between the works, the space dictating the context of this interaction. The theatre was host to Conrad Ventur’s performative installation Will to Power, but also to HTRK’s live concert which housed Ventur’s work during the night. Matthew Stone’s fantastic performance mixing sound, digital environments and live music, Anatomy of Immaterial Worlds, also occupied the theatre space and bled out into a foyer that was housing a live DJ set with Pandora’s Jukebox. This made the focus of the weekend not a pure interest in content but in form and perception, and a context not concerned with genre but with models of communication.

How did this happen practically? ‘The initial idea was to have the ground gallery, and then we had to integrate Bloomberg New Contemporaries into that, which I actually quite enjoyed. This slight randomness of spaces has been quite positively limitating. I found it interesting to have a programme that takes over exclusively the auxiliary spaces of the gallery, the non-exhibition spaces. Brought together these become the institution. The spaces in-between are also passages, which was quite exciting, because audiences could meet along the way. I found it a really challenging solution in terms of letting the program infiltrate the space but without being aggressive, for example, with using signage.’

And how did Italo Calvino support the curatorial approach? ‘I had read Calvino’s text a while back, and it obviously stayed in the back of my mind. His vision was to have a special magical touch with which he could capture the facts of the world and translate them with a very light touch- history, reality, tends to be quite sombre as he defines it. This role of depiction and translation of reality into a work, in this case a text, is not possible in a direct way, it needs to be manipulated. In his case, it’s the style- he’s trying to find stratagems to convey the significance of the reality that he’s depicting but without transferring it, because it could never be as effective. His creative action is the stratagem- each essay has a specific constructed point of view that allows for refraction. This was exactly what gravity was for our programme, a stratagem for ideas. It’s a vehicle to access.’

The programme merged the subversive and politically sensitive, from Ruth Beale’s performance/presentation Art for Virture’s Sake to more challenging works such as Stone’s Anatomy of Immaterial Worlds . It’s a risk Against Gravity took in an institutional setting. ‘The economical crisis has been a very hard time on institutions and it’s much more demanding in terms of customer satisfaction which isn’t always the best way to guide projects. One of the comments to Matthew’s performance was that it was more demanding than entertaining. I think a great part of the public found that offensive, and there was a huge discussion around it- but it got people talking.’ This is not a unique event in contemporary interdisciplinary work, yet Stone’s performance aimed to bring together the urban model of experiencing whilst engaging in a dialogue with the spiritual- transcendence in and through technology. This materialized during the performance, as the more the sound become a physical rhythm, the more the senses opened up to embrace the unexpectedness of the projection, which took the form of a journey deep into the core of a rock formation.

Against Gravity tried to evade the prejudices against institutional behaviour. ‘I don’t think I’m particularly chuffed in the difference between non profit, institutionalized or profit based. I used to be- but now if I think the show is very good, I wouldn’t boycott. Some of the projects I want to do are organized collaborations between foundations and non for profit organizations. On an economical level the only way forward is for arts practice and for the art system is to install collaborations between groups, ventures that don’t have to be relegated to art, but to design, or music or performance. That’s the only way to create sustainable programmes. Institutions have to compromise, whereas sharing is the way to go, and can be interesting when you have different disciplines and programmes and cultural environments mingling and building themselves up.’ So is the curator more of a networker, a cultural activist then? ‘I think curators are strange figures. Curators could be facilitators only, but if I start a dialogue, I do it because I want to be part of it, or I’m involved in it. But I don’t make art, I’m part of a form of cultural activity’.

How does this work within a wider socio-political context? ‘I would like to live in a world where culture is just culture.’