‘Junction of the Eyes’ is an artistic research journey by interdisciplinary artist Annelieke Holland. Through an experiment-driven approach, the research operates at the intersection of performance, film and expanded cinema.
‘Junction of the Eyes’ explores performative modes of image making: To do, to undergo, to look. Acts of recording, framing, observing, the act of posing, staging, receiving one's look and the act of spectating are all explored as gestures that contribute equally to the meaning of images. Through this process, what gets revealed is not necessarily the image itself, but the relation that emerges between the one producing and receiving the image.
Movement practices, family archives and photographs from a past relationship all become material through which to investigate acts of looking and recording. By doing so Annelieke revisits memories, intimate relations and cultural sites for spectatorship - all through the lens of giving and receiving gazes.
From ‘Junction of the Eyes’ two distinct yet unified practices emerge: ‘Performing the Spectator’ and ‘Performing the Archive’.
Performing the Spectator explores the relationship between body and camera, spectator and spectacle through movement practices. A physical and visual study that attempts to embody gestures of looking and being looked at, through bodies, recording devices and architectures. This study operates through a film and expanded cinema practice.
The research subverts the subject-object relationship between the camera operator and what it is filming, between the audience and the performance. By turning the camera on the observer and placing a counter eye looking back, the spectator shifts back and forth from subject and object.
The research explores the experience of an observer as they become confronted with their act of looking, as well as being activated and transformed when receiving one's glance. It aims to capture the tension as well as the intimacy within this exchange.
‘Performing the Archive’ revisits personal relationships through memories, language and personal archives. It explores the superimposition of past, present and future, which is embedded in all vernacular photography and recordings. This culminates in two research projects, operating within a film and performance practice.
‘Sunsets are for Tourists’ reflects on a past relationship, the way ex-lovers did or did not document each other, sexuality and the internalised male gaze, for both partners.
The other project, ‘Piano Loops’ (working title) deals with a family archive, the repetitions in a family history, mother-daughter relationship, recordings of stage arts and ways of performing the archive.
I watch a videotape of myself when I was little. In the tape, I am on stage and the audience is watching me, I hold their attention. Knowing what my mother would say if she were to see this, I invite her to watch with me. I place a camera and an audio recorder in the room, exposing me and my mother to these recording devices, the observers. We in turn observe me from the past. The younger me is being exposed to an audience and is observing them back.
It became a research practice. Each time I add a layer in which something or someone is being observed. I place these layers on top of each other, letting them exist simultaneously. In addition, the positioning of those layers in relation to each other creates a kind of choreography of giving and receiving gazes.
Another moment, a performance. I play a cassette tape of my mother's final concert at the conservatory. Every now and then we hear the applause of the audience on the cassette. The two performances by her and me, both exam moments as well, are overlaid.
On top I play another tape. My mother turns out to be the same age in the recording as I am now. She’s speaking to a fortune-teller, a medium who tells her of things yet to come. Together they look into the future and speculate about her having children. Being this future I observe her back. We look at each other through time while we are both the same age.
Further on, I play fragments in which my mother trains my sister and I, while still being a toddler, to do acts. She positions herself and the cassette recorder as the spectators. Bravo! she says. Next, we hear my grandfather announcing my mother doing acts as a child and him recording her. By juxtaposing all these parallels and moments of performance and observation, a hall of mirrors emerges.
The performative moments create echoes across the family timeline. Gestures and gazes are exchanged between generations. By piling all these layers of viewing on top of each other, like a kind of matryoshka, allows present, past and future to coincide.
Is a recording always a performance towards the future?
How to perform the archive in order to invoke it?
Is the performer of the archive a medium themselves?
What unifies these distinct practices is not only the act of looking and recording and the exchange of gazes, but also a methodology that has developed through practice based approach. A glimpse of an idea is put to the test through an experimental production, whose meaning is found in the making process and subsequent reflection. In this way, each work made within this research, whether the exchange of gaze in performance and image production, or in the family or intimate archive, exists in relation to each other and builds on the experience of producing the previous one.
‘Junction of the Eyes’ explores the performative gestures that are embedded in the production of sound and image.
Several projects are currently in development.
Within Performing the Spectator, two three-channel video installations are being developed. One of which is a choreography between two camera operators, and one slow-motion work of a sometimes naked female body in painting-like positions.
Also in development is one short film set in a peepshow space and a bird-watching house. And one expanded cinema piece made for the traditional movie theatre.
Within Performing the Archive, there is a performance and film project in development working with the archive of a mother being performed and augmented by her daughter. And a short photo film drawing from an intimate archive of a past relationship.
Annelieke Holland is a performer, theatre director and video artist, based in Amsterdam. She graduated from the prestigious theatre school Toneelacademie Maastricht in 2017, where she majored in Performance. In recent years, Annelieke lived and worked between Amsterdam and Morocco where she joined the Queens Collective Marrakech and supervised solo projects at the MBO theatre school in Rotterdam, before entering the master program. Annelieke's work is shown at the European Media Art Festival, Festival Cement, Le 18 Marrakech and Eye Amsterdam, amongst others.
