A small conference on Cultural Mobility of Performance and Performativity Studies organised in the beautiful old building of the Jagellonian University brought me to Krakow together with the HTDTWP group, that is, the How to do things with performance research project. I did carry my camera, tripod, pink scarf and black trousers with me, with the plan to spend the last day finding a suitable tree. After the conference I felt exhausted and joined Pilvi Porkola and Hanna Järvinen on a walk to the Kantor Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both located other side of the river. And I decided I would NOT carry my equipment with me, ”just in case”. When we were returning to the hotel through the park and passed an elder tree with a low bending trunk that we had passed the day before, I asked Pilvi to take a snapshot of me sitting in the tree. What was meant as a simple souvenir to begin with, nevertheless turned into a small performance recorded on video, with my phone. The transformation from snapshot to ”serious” image making can be seen in the sequence of images, below. What was remarkable, from my perspective, was not so much to have other people with me, nor missing my costume, perhaps not even the use of a simple phone camera, but the idea that somebody else was holding the camera and framing the image. Suddenly I became a performer, a model or an actress for somebody else, even though I suggested that Pilvi might take an ”arlander-style” image from the back side. Later I edited a short video by reversing the order of the three video clips, With and Elder in Krakow (2 min. 6 sec), and uploaded it on the Research Catalogue, here.
Afterwards I thought about it, and realized, this could be one way to develop my practice of sitting in, on or with trees to be something more sociable: to invite people to use the camera, rather than to pose for it, as I have previously tried to do in the swinging together images. Hm. I have to think about that…