Just did my tourist series today - doing yoga poses (often as a spectacle seen as sacred or sexual & appropriated from india) in front of various Berlin monuments and asking tourists to photograph me in my red costume (which seems to be becoming a through line) ... which was highly interactive and interesting, could go a lot further. very cold today! but got some great shots and interactions.. responses.
The photos are hilarious, once again I am reminded that my ideas are actually quite ridiculous while also serious. I am interested in playing the line of comedy/parody and earnestness, I don't think it needs to be set in concrete either. I really felt at moments as if i was 'disrespecting' some kind of institution (playing the tourist line but subverting it) and at other times like I was bringing something loving to it, bringing life/the suppressed feminine back to it, which was reflected back at me in responses from 'you look like a flaming flower growing out of the building' to 'ein bißchen comisch'... :) all good!
A tour guide interrogated me and took a pic for me and himself about what i was doing.. which he understood and offered his card- saying he could take me to some really good places (he had a small riding cart) which is a different turn again, me 'paying' him to take me around.. and photograph me at these sites. Was it a come on? I noticed that men were fairly fascinated by what I was doing, but in the photos many people are also watching me as a spectacle. I am interested in walking the line between tourist and artist as a woman, the money related issues around this, spectacle, site, women's body as inherent monument unsacrilised in the same way as these monuments, like reinstalling the live female body not as an object so much, but as an identity, a presence amidst such rigid masculine structures. The humour as well for me could go even further though I like the on the edge is this for real or not? I don't know if i'm achieving it .. & its a beginning point.. particularly in Paris- i noticed a lot of the golden statues are of 'women' representing this notion of freedom (a bit like the victory statue in Berlin) - yet its a highly sexist culture.. seemingly.
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