Material
As a woman throughout all my life I’ve learnt how exactly I am supposed to deal with plates.
As an artist working on this project I’ve rediscovered this familiar material and found out that the plates are not only what they seemed to be.
I found plenty of them at the abandoned ceramic factory in the North of Spain. They stuck in the very special state of transition: already not a clay, but not yet an enamelled and completed table ware. Thus their function could be redefined by certain interaction. With this purpose I did several visits to the factory. 

Performance 
Instead of carrying the plates with my hands I decided to walk on them with my bare feet. Once I put them in tall pillars they ceased to be just plates. Slight touch was enough for them to start shaking, vibrating and shifting. The taller the pillars got the more they demanded from me. I had to adjust my touch and pressure, to observe angle of tilt, to listen their shiver. Standing on them, trying to find a perfect balance, I was learning how to unite with the plates. 
The exact moment of accomplishing the walk was captured in one of the pictures. I’d just jumped from the tallest pillar out of the picture frame, so that pillars had their own solo. Through observing distortion and transformation of the material, we have the chance to imagine what is hidden behind familiar and simple plates.

Sound
During the performance I recorded sounds with binaural microphones which were located in my ears. It means that listening to the audio-compositions build up from recorded sounds  let you hear it the same way if you were me walking on plates at the abandoned factory.

Walk of Plates was developed during 4-week Just Mad Art Residency in Spain and later on became part of group exhibition at Just Mad Air Fair in Madrid. 

Projects was displayed as unity of three:  
- Photo documentation of performance
- Audio composition of binaural audio, recorded during the performance
- Open and interactive installation of plates from the site

The events took place on January and February 2017.



Walk of Plates

Idea
The performance creates a surrounding for collective research, in which each participant, the artist as well as the viewer, is allowed to test the limits of habitual behaviorist models and assess their readiness to acquire new experience and assume a new role entailing unexpected reactions and consequences. The viewers can participate in the performance by taking a bunch of keys and finding the one that will undo the lock on the artist's neck. 

Materials
• body
• dress
• transparent plastic collar fixing me to the wall
• metallic locker attached to the collar
• many keys in a single bunch, some of them can unlock the locker
• viewers / participants

Action
I sit on a chair in the artist's room in the Berlusconi Arc. Seen from a certain distance, it seems as if I were feeling comfortable. But at a closer look can be seen a transparent, almost invisible collar that fixes my posture. The audience understands that I cannot
get up or considerably alter my position. The collar is closed with a locker.

The next thing that is seen in the room is a bedside table with a bunch of two hundred keys on it, but only a few keys can unlock the locker. These keys become a sort of invitation to the viewers. It is up to them to decide whether to find the right key and set me free or leave me as I am. However, the performance does not end with releasing the locker. After I have been set free, I suggest that the participant should take my place. If he or she refuses, I ask them to lock me again. If they accept, I sit them on the chair and close the locker. What I do next depends on the situation: I witness what is happening and then either invite the viewers to take 
a bunch of keys and release the participant or find the right key on my own and return to the "comfort zone".

Photography by Asya Freiya

Comfort Zone

The site-specific performance Synchronicities took place at the abandoned mine on Cyprus as part of CIPAF International Performance art festival. 
Idea and intention: to synchronize with environment, objects and audience through action. 

Action: 
I chose to work around a small open-air pool with toxic water. There I found a beautiful object - long and narrow rusty iron saw and decided to create and develop my performative actions with it. 

First I walked, danced and made sounds with it. Than I started to use it as a comb for my hair. Finally, I invited audience to participate and help me with combing.People did even more - they invited other people and combed their hair. 

Photography by Skevi Laou

Synchronicities

Social frameworks, limits of decency, scope of relations. Communication is regulated at all levels like body, age, clothing, gestures, facial expressions, intonation and speech. Based on the regulation, communication is often only polite form. 
The performance explores significance and / or illusory of such a framework, which is replaced by the picture on the wall; suggesting to clear this communication to its very foundations by impersonal pair of watchful eyes. 
The artist and viewer are separated by the wall. The artist has a only available way of communication to look. But the viewer is not limited in the methods of interaction. 

Photography by Aleksey Domrachev

Within the Framework

The performance explores existential fear of loneliness. How does our nature combine the need of contact with others and the necessity to distance from them defending our borders? Can closeness even exist if everyday experience of existence makes a person sharp as a needle? 
During the performance the artist repeats the same action: she invites visitors to experience closeness with her by raising her hands in a gesture of embrace. A visitor becomes an active participant of the performance. The artist initiates closeness, but only visitor defines the further course of events. 
Interaction with the audience begins long before physical contact. The visitor sees the needle and realizes possible consequences of this contact - the closest contact will hurt him and the artist. Therefore, some visitors keep the distance and have a limited eye contact. 

Photography by Svetlana Selezneva and Asya Freiya

Closeness

The concept and action 

'Witness' is a series of non-public performances in which I become 24 hours witness of another person's life who is a complete stranger. My objective is to keep silence, always to be nearby and to follow the person wherever he or she goes watching and actively perceiving the whole context of the life. Formally, I take a passive position nothing initiating and nowhere being involved. This allows me to focus on what is happening. I also do an intense inner work, which helps me to get quickly in touch with the person and to find a common rhythm. In short, this is a certain technique of presence and work with attention used by contemporary dancers and performance artists. 

Participants 

Any person can become a participant of the performance willing to let me into his/her live for 24 hours. Their task is to pre-arrange my 100% presence in all areas of their stay and just live a typical day. I warn the participant in advance of the forms of performance documentation and get permission to use these materials and personal data for a further publication. In 2016, I made several interventions to the life and work of different people. I find the participants guided by the criteria of social diversity and involve people of different age, gender, occupation, ethnicity, social class, income. By these criteria and also by witness life's frame I explore a variety of forms and methods of organization people's life in a modern city. 

Coexistence 

For 24 hours I see into the other person, and the other see into me. Closeness, duration and quality of a contact enhance our identities. Noting these differences we continue to look at each other as in a mirror, recognizing those or others features. 
Every time it is a new and very intense experience of our own nature and identity in a particular social context. We go through a process of recognition and synchronization, overcoming discord and moving from "unfamiliar= strange = wrong" to "familiar=apprehensible= received." As a result, we get a temporary co-existence and witness each other as we are. 

Photography by Eugene Kazakov, Olga Belova and Olga Kozmanidze


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OLGA KOZMANIDZE