l'art pour l'art

Romeo Gongora

I AM THE OTHER (2009)

This project consist on a series of experimental actions revisiting Lygia Clark’s “Estruturacao do Self”.

Started at the end of seventies, “Estruturacao do Self” defines the last artistic phase of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. For that project, she interacted for one hour with her “patients”, whom she met one on one three times a week, by using different objects on their bodies. She not only extensively commented on these therapies, but they where also recorded visually. For me, what comes out of these documents is a mystical aura surrounding the participants, and the intensity of Clark’s thoughts, highlighting the ambivalence of some concepts relating to art, as well as social sciences, like readymade, spectator, alienation, rationality, …

During a residence at CoCA in Torun (Poland), I revisited and revised Clark’s “Estruturacao do Self” by doing a series of experimental actions for which I used tactics of appropriation, derivation, and reinterpretation. Also dealing with the local context of Torun, I have thus produced in-situ objects, and inhabitants of the city were involved in these “therapy” sessions.