In „Making Fetish“ i explore issues of reality and “make believe”, of social interaction and image. I dance for you and the random strangers on Chatroulette.com.
„Our contemporary understanding of fetish – a term appropriated by Marx and Freud to describe Western habits of ascribing inordinate value to commodity objects – has ist origins in William Pietz´s analysis of the accounts of 16th – 18th century encounters between European and African traders. European traders misinterpreted the African traders ascription of value to apparently arbitrary objects. The anthropologist David Graeber analyses the effect that this cultural mistranslation has had and points out that the fetish was never intended to be, an object of value in itself. Rather it was an element of a ritual of what he calls „making fetish“, a means of creating „new social responsibilities, new contracts or agreements“. The fetish symbolized the power of social relations in material form. The notion of „making fetish“ implies „that by a form of collective investment one can, in effect, create a new god on the spot“. - Extracts by Catherine Wood from her book: „The Mind is a Muscle
Is that the role of creativity, collective or individual, of the imagination, in continuously changing social enviroments? To learn more about it i pose the solo performance “Making Fetish” as a social ritual and try to explore relations between image and social interaction, reality and “make believe”. The apparently arbitrary object will be a flower in a glas of water. With continuous movement the solo works its way through the interlocking spaces of the mind and body, sustaining an ever-shifting environment. Dancing, i challenge my own self-perception, generating an introspection. Seated on 2 sides of the dancer, the spectators become close witnesses of this undertaking. They are complicit in the act of producing and collecting the images that emerge, and at times literally implicated in the events that materialize amidst them.
I will also dance for people in the internet chat (on www.chatroulette.com) where communication is random, anonym, deviant and inodorous. A webcam films my dancing and will get published right away on chatroulette. People from all over the world will get connected to this event randomly. This was technically never possible before. They can discuss, charge, write, evaluate this event. The live audience will watching the “random internet audience” how they watching me dancing. The Terms and definitions of authenticity and signification, of reality and “make believe” are deployed and re-evaluated.
Concept/ Performer: Maik Riebort
Supported by Bergen Council (Norway), Dock11 Berlin, Wrap Huset Bergen (Norway)
Showing - 35 min.
Wrap Huset, Bergen (Norway) - 22.10.2011