Last PerformanssiPerjantai is hosted and curated by Art Contact Helsinki. Mad House’s Juha Valkeapää sat down with Art Contact’s Willem Wilhelmus and asked few questions about performance art.
0.Who are you?
How do we get our names? When people say ”Willem”, I react. My parents gave me that name. Wilhelmus Wilhelmus. Who am I behind this name? Call me by my rightful name by John Coltrane & Archie Shepp. I’m strongest when making performances. That’s me.
1. What is performance art?
I can’t say anything in general, it’s too wide to define. For me it means creating small segments in time and space, when I’m totally in my element. Genuineness. Not to act, not to be something else that I am, to be busy with something. Total composition of things and acts, the visual side is also important, and not to forget about audio. It has an impact, the performance art act. Catching the moment when it comes, and sometimes it comes.
2. Why do you make performance art? Why do you organize performance art events?
To be in my element. And because I want to see other people in their elements, too. (Laughter.) Why is it important? It’s good and needed to bring people together. It's communication. That’s why I call these events Art Contact. Contact through art, and vice versa, art through contact.
3. Describe your finest or most touching or most intense or simply THE performance art experience ever, please. Why that one?
My next one will be that. It’s may be funnily said, but seriously, by saying that I put myself under pressure. I want to give my very best.
Other artists whom I’m happy to see works by, whose works are especially resonating, the way they are: Nathalie Mba Bikoro, Boris Nieslony, Bartholomé Ferrando. Well, this list could continue forever...
Art Contact event in Mad House on Friday 20 November 2015 starting 20:00
The Air We Share
In the huge Tiivistämö space Art Contact will present a simultaneous action involving 10 artists of different disciplines, mostly performance artists, but also musicians, visual artists and more.
Each artist is asked to present his/her action during the whole one hour event. By being sensitive towards each other – and giving others the space and the possibility to be in their element We hope to create an artistic dreamworld for an attentive audience.
It is an experiment in collaboration of otherwise individual(istic) artists.