De Appel

From The Archive: Minutes Of The Meeting

05 - 31 Jul 2016

Still Minutes of the Meeting, Nan Hoover, 1977, 23'27''
FROM THE ARCHIVE: MINUTES OF THE MEETING
5 — 31 July 2016

The performance "Minutes of the Meeting" that Nan Hoover (1931-2008) presented together with Sam Schoenbaum at Agora studio in Maastricht in 1977 was realized with the support of Wies Smals, founder of de Appel arts centre.

For the performance two different spaces were used so that the audience was seperated from the artist. Sam Schoenbaum, in-between the two spaces, is telling a story starting from a quote from Freud. “The unconscious system may therefore be compared to a large ante-room, in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception room, in which consciousness resides. But on the threshold of the two, there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them and denies them admittance to the reception room when he disapproves of them...”

Hoover conducts minimal, symmetrical movements responding to the narration and the public that is in the other room. Through monitors she sees the public and the public sees her movements. Sam Schoenbaum acts as "doorkeeper" between the two spaces, between the unconscious and conscious, the physical and mental, and the separation between performer and audience.

LocusSolus is a space for staging de Appel arts centre’s living past and lively present. Unravelling and dynamic, in black and white or full-colour HD, LocusSolus shows the fundaments of de Appel arts centre, her surroundings, the now and everything thereafter, to deepen and intensify her future.
 

Tags: Nan Hoover