Nina Meško: MY PRIVATE ARCHIVE

After my last performance The State of Things I didn’t have any new idea to work on. I hoped to
find one during my Tanzquartier Wien residency.
During the first half of the residency I was reading books, looking through video tapes, seeing
exhibitions and performances, meeting new people.
Time passed but no new idea appeared.
And then I decided I wanted to talk to other choreographers and performance artists about
their ideas and about their artistic decisions.
My starting point was a statement by Ian Wilson, conceptual artist from the 1970s, “oral
communication is a lot more than language; it is one of the best mediums for the
dissemination of ideas”.
So, during my last two weeks of the residency I made conversations.
I started each conversation from the point of what I knew already about the person with
whom I was having the conversation. Most of the time the conversations became a really
lively exchange of Q&A.
At the beginning of each conversation I asked each one to position the camera on the
studio as she or he liked to see it. The camera was then recording the empty studio space
and us talking for one hour. Many times we would go on for longer.
I talked to:
Anne Juren
Cezary Thomacevski
Chris Haring
Doris Stalzer
Jennifer Lacey
Kroot Juurak
Lisa Hintereg
Michiatu Matsune
Miguel Gutierrez
Milli Bitterli
Moravia Naranjo
Oleg Soulimenko
Each conversation was very different. Sometimes it was more like an interview, other times
more like an expert debate or confession or just a small talk or all of these.
I’m almost sure that most of the times we both benefited a lot from it.
And sometimes after I felt an excitement about the new ideas that appeared.
‘Til now I have made 12 conversations and I decided I want to continue doing them.
My research has turned into a project which is a work-in-progress and I want to continue
doing conversations for many more years. I want to build a big private archive of
conversations.
These conversations are not available to be watched except with the permission of the
artist.