My name is Gluklya, I am of Russian origin, living now in Amsterdam and St-Petersburg (RU), artist and therapist, acting individually.
I am also a co-founder and member of the multidisciplinary platform chto delat https://chtodelat.org
I am welcoming you to perform together on the 27 February at 1 pm in Purpluscode building!
Please bring a garment with you that you would like to burn!
I believe that art can heal and give strength and that we need to invent other rituals that can mobilize our community in our dark times. Other rituals than the ones that society forces us to do every day. Let’s resist artificial strategy of our governments to separate us from each other and form our own needs and feelings.
I propose to burn the clothes that brought you disappointment or pain. Something that you want to forgive and forget. I propose to see burning as an act of forgiving, because only after forgiving you can forget.
Let me share with you the preposition of our meeting :
1 pm
Art talk of Gluklya as an intro to the performance
2 pm
Sharing the stories of clothes that you want to burn
3 pm
Burning the garments
4 pm
Celebration feast
5 pm
Departure because of traffic
Let s upgrade ourselves collectively!
Maybe during the process of this performance, we will come to new revitalizing solutions for us and society. It is our journey and I am welcoming you to step into it!
Sincerely yours,
Gluklya
I have constructed the situation to share the negative experiences that have happened with the members of the purpluscode community. We talked and focused on the clash between the personal and the political. There were stories about sexual and psychological assault, a frustration about nobody coming to the open call, and others. I proposed to burn the clothing pieces that were acting as a reminder to the unpleasant experiences that people carry. After the act of burning, liberational sprits came upon us, and we had an open discussion.
Performance in Jatiwangi Art Factory, Indonesia /2020
I have constructed the situation for the focused tet-a-tet Dialogue about the Realization of Your Dream in the Bamboo Shelter for the Good Spirit, which I have built with the help of wonderful workers. The topic came from the Community. In the context of the decolonization process, I refused to work with my own topic, but took the one which was already there.
I have invited people to speak about their dream and then asked them to draw it.
It was amazing to discover that interest in European Psychoanalysis is present there. The combination of Islam, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis gave an interesting context for the performance and a boost for the research in general.
I intended to leave the Bamboo Shelter for the Good Spirit for the Community so that the inhabitants might have the opportunity to use it further for the development of the new method of Indonesian Psychoanalysis.
The frame of my research is the study of decolonization processes in Europe and Russia with the help of interviews, performances, and workshops, with the outcome of the exhibition in Framer Framed in Amsterdam and other places.
The Motivation behind my trips to Indonesia and post Soviet Asian countries is to discover the techniques and knowledge of a healthy collaboration between body, mind, and spirit by learning about it from rituals and stories and inventing new rituals and learning narratives to establish a new context of the mutual exchange between Asia and Europe.
3 April Now every time going “buiten” became a breathtaking adventure. Before you were just going out and it is an ordinary trip with usual sites. And now als je in de straat gaan -there is a real theater going on. Amazingly, how all people in such a short time became disciplined actors. They stop if they see you already from 8 meters, looking down passing by, doing a derive if the road is too narrow by going on the opposite side of the street, gazing suspicious or with the open scariness in the shop if you violate 1,5 m by chance. Are humans becoming enemies! ?? This night I had a dream that I got a hand with a sophisticated prosthesis that can feel the skin of the person you want to touch and at the same time keep a distance. It would be great to find the scientist who is thinking in the same direction and can create this hand together.
I made these during one of those days when you just can not start to do anything, cos of thoughts are jumping one on another and it is hard to focus. Then I decided to find the balance during the portrait of this condition, persuading myself by the proposition that “everybody has these now”. I have added the pattern of the shirt of my mother with blue stripes that she wared last skype. It reminds me of her shirt when she was young and we were together during summer holidays at the Black Sea after I have passed successfully the exam to Muchina Academy.
It is the tree of punished by different ways women, in Europe and Colonized countries, including self-punishment, as the result of the trauma of patriarchal oppression, in many cases going through generations. I am combining on my drawing the image of the Middle Age masks of punishment which was put on women if they allowed to raise their voice or say something critical, with the image of contemporary clothes and some mythological characters, probably appeared to defend the psycho from the horror of reality.
This tree unites all feminisms. The principal problem that feminism is facing now is the abundance of its varieties that have so decisively decomposed into different positions. In this sense, “feminism” begins to lose its integrity and, at the same time, political strength. Today we know about the existence of many forms: anarcho-feminism, ecofeminism, queer feminism, left- and right-wingfeminism, cyberfeminism, xenofeminism, and some new hitherto unknown new feminism which is emerging right now. This work reflects on the topic of multi-layer concepts of feminism and at the same time encourages one to think about the possible unification of different concepts in the face of a global catastrophe. We are already facing this potential catastrophe in the form of revenge on nature – for the way in which people are ignorantly responding to nature today.
This is a tree on which clothes of different genders are hung, but not at all to which we are accustomed. It represents much more: today we can distinguish in addition to cis-men and cis-women, trans men, trans women, an elderly woman living with cats and dogs, and other women, an elderly man living with domestic animals, also people living alone without animals, but speaking with plants, or just alone, but then have a special relationship with things around him/her, also men and women working overtime, burning themselves in labor when the body is forgotten and as if it does not exist, as well as many types of genders that will be best manifested through this work..
It is also a tree of women punished in various ways, including self-punishment, which comes from guilt.Guilt, which at any moment can become aggression and simultaneously turn into retaliation and serious crime. Recall the heroine of the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxellesby Chantal Ackerman, a good, virtuous mother and housewife who kills her lover in the end. Let us recall the millions of women who live like mechanical dolls, who have forgotten or do not even know what happiness is.
It is also a tree of Unsubordinated. The one whodoes not give up becomes a feminist. For each individual, feminism is a personal experience of suffering. But it is overcome by the collective effort of unification.
Of course, unification is easy to conceive, but it is not at all easy to realize. Taking into account the concept of dissension so beloved by the left movement: “Let the right hang out and unite — our strength in a polyphonic dispute of different positions.”The time has come tothink about this and convene an international movement: Women of all countries and all genders, faiths and nationalities — unite!
Черное Дерево Дружбы
Это дерево, объединяющее все феминизмы. Главная проблема, с которой сталкивается сейчас феминизм, – это обилие его вариантов, которые настолько не похожи друг на друга, что становится страшно потерять его целостность и вместе с тем его политическую силу. На сегодняшний день мы знаем о существовании анархофеминизма, экофеминизма, квирфеминизма, левого и правого феминизмов, киберфеминизма, ксенофеминизма и, вероятно, прямо сейчас зарождается еще какой-нибудь новый, неведомый нам феминизм.
Эта работа рефлексирует многослойность понятия «феминизм» и одновременно призывает задуматься о возможном объединении разных концепций перед лицом глобальной катастрофы, уже разворачивающейся в виде мести природы людям, невежественно с ней обращающимся.
Это дерево, на котором развешаны одежды, принадлежащие разным гендерам. Не только двум, к которым мы привыкли, – цис-мужчинам и цис-женщинам – но также и транс-мужчинам и транс-женщинам, пожилой женщине, живущей с кошками, собаками и другими женщинами, пожилому мужчине, живущему с домашними животными, одиноким людям, общающимся только с предметами или растениями, людям, работающим сверхурочно и сжигающим себя на работе, когда тело забывается, словно оно и не существует, а также многим другим типам гендеров.
Это также дерево женщин, наказанных разными способами, женщин, страдающих от чувства вины, которoe в любую минуту может обернуться возмездием, подобным героини фильма Шанталь Аккерман “Жанна Дильман, набережная Коммерции 23, Брюссель 1080”, добродетельной домохозяйке-проститутке, убившей своего клиента. Вспомним миллионы женщин, живущих так же механически, как Жанна Дильман, и забывших или даже не знающих ничего о счастье.
Это также дерево Несдавшихся. Те, которые не сдались, становятся феминистками. За каждым отдельным феминизмом стоит индивидуальный опыт страдания, которое преодолевается коллективным усилием объединения.
Конечно, такое объединение легко помыслить, но совсем нелегко осуществить, принимая во внимание диссенсус, столь любимый левым движением:пусть правые тусуются и объединяются – наша сила в полифоническом споре разных позиций.
Настало время думать о возможности объединения и создания международного движения: Женщины всех стран и всех гендеров, конфессий и национальностей – объединяйтесь!
We managed to construct a space of trust between us.
At first, I was dealing with the issue of the frame of the ArteUtil concept and the experimental rules that the Artez team exposed to me as one of the artists.
The idea was to try to “learn from doing” and to send a couple of artists to an “adult” artist in Amsterdam to help artists in their daily routine.
I was thinking about what type of daily routine I should do when I decided to shift to the kind of “therapy mentor-comrade care” approach.
I have to share my knowledge with the students and to help them in overcoming their fears and to grow better. As usual, I was trying to stay open to learning from students as well. They came from Peru and Colombia, and I did not know much about these countries.
We started with dealing with a bunch of drawings from the previous project in Bijlmer Bajes. We talked about their possible classification and then moved to the discussion about family bonds, stereotypes of gender, and relationships with the body.
Malena and Lina surprised me with how interesting their understanding of the body is. We talked about the “naked body of mother “, for example.
I showed them my Museum of the Utopian Clothes, told stories about the dresses and they exposed the desire to do something with a dress.
They introduced me to the Chia seeds fashion and proposed to grow Chia seeds right inside the very beautiful evening dress that I have found at Waterloo in Amsterdam.
The Chia seeds were planted into the dress. After one week, lots of green sprouts grew out of them. Another week passed by, and the spouts started to decay. I was watching this process unravel in my studio.
Malena had a few thoughts after this experiment that she shared with me:
“Gluklya is a fantastic, one of a kind artivist, who welcomed me and my peer Lina into her world for a month and a half. During our workshops in her studio in Amsterdam, I got to explore her methods and perspectives through her drawings, costumes, stories, and food. During each session, we created a ritual. They came out of discussions we shared regarding topics of feudalism, sexism, and racism, fueled by our mothers’ stories and status in society, which helped us bridge the distance between our home countries: Peru, Colombia, and Russia. As an outcome, we created a quipu (a unique form of ancient communication and information storage used by the Inca Empire and their predecessors in South America), as a tool for taking a break, breathe and heal, combining our rituals. Through the quipu, we invited a few guests to take the time to think. And if there’s nothing to think about, to take the time to breathe. I feel inspired by her work and methodology, I carry it with me now on my journey of becoming an Artist Educator.”
– Malena Ugaz | Interactive/Media/Designer | Based in Geneva
Lina also had things to share:
“For me working with Gluklya was getting immersed in a research process that was constantly moved through intuition.
We created dialogues from within, and through aesthetic experiences, we created dialogues between us.
We had a very powerful work of finding subtle connections by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in the working space.
I felt very comfortable and cared for in our working sessions.
We talked and got to know each other and our ideas through drawing.
We went on adventures to the Waterloo market, learned to talk the language of textures, and used textiles to approach our feelings and ideas of the body.
We played with video and photography.
We were gardeners of chía seeds in dresses and gardeners of our own emotions and stories.
Personally, I feel that she encouraged me to pursue my bodywork as part of my artistic research.
As a closure of our research project, we performed a ritual/workshop to create a common body of stories through the use of the ancient Andean Quipu device.
It was a very powerful experience of approaching the search for group synergy.
Working with Gluklya was a rich aesthetic and artistic experience to create connections with others and with the world. “
