A conversation between Dominika Hádělová and Anne Dubos, an anthropologist and an artist living in Paris. The conversation took place in Paris and in Aberdeen over Skype in December 2015.

- Anne

At present I work at the National School for Industrial Design and Creation as a teacher. There, I try to lead the students to think what is a gesture and how we could make a library of gestures. So we work on « past » gesture and « future » gesture and we try to question what is a gesture and what can be interesting for a designer. I try to lead them to think how objects can be some kind of scores for gestures.

Dominika

This is very interesting - my final project at university was based on my trip to Sri Lanka. I am coming to realize that I am interested in something between visual arts and human geography - how people form places, how places influence us, how both are intertwined. I wrote a script that was read aloud and there were objects and gestures that I tried to recreate from my memory. They were the gestures and objects that really made the place [Sri Lanka] for me. I still quite do not know how to label these things but - for example, I formed a sieve from a metal tin and then there was the gesture of sieving flour through it. Or the gesture of … there was a woman on a bus who was sat in front of me and she did this hair bun and it was an image that really stuck to my memory. I had a collection of these eclectic moments and gestures that hold a strong meaning to me and they all together formed the place for me. So I tried to recreate it - to represent the place. The final outcome was meant to be almost like a theatre stage featuring some sound, gestures, objects and I was hoping it would work together but it’s all just a starting point and yes, I wonder what is a gesture, what is it so intriguing about this little thing.

Anne

And how do you think I can help you? Dominika

You have an anthropological background and you seem to be interested in the visual arts too…

Anne

Yes, I do both. I am an artist and an anthropologist. I have been doing my research of PhD, on contemporary Indian theatre, especially in South India, in Kerala. I studied the social structure and I also studied how people make things, such art and aesthetic things. I had the idea that it could be a social way of expressing themselves. So I tried to understand how we can recognize it’s Malayalam art and not Tamil or any other aesthetic at the interplay. It’s always something special in the features.

Dominika

How did you become interested in this particular thing of gestures and south Indian theatre?

Anne

At the beginning I was interested in studying people’s life and how people move. I think I always was interested in photography. So it became a cinematographic interpretation. You can imagine your eyes just like a machine to make cinema. You have your own vision of life and your own perception makes you look at things differently than other people. So you can imagine your cognitive system is like a camera. So I used to write films without a camera because I was a student of social anthropology and I had no money to buy one but I always had so many films in my head I wanted to write. I think that is how I came to be interested in theatre. I was selling clothes in a huge supermarket called Galerie Lafayette when I was a student, and I used to look at it like a scene from a cinema or theatre, you know people were always performing something. I was interested in how one is making the design around him to perform a social role.

Dominika

Exactly. I like to take time just to sit down and observe what is happening around me, especially if it’s in a place where I do not understand the language. It’s so intriguing to observe how people move and go about things. It’s like a scene that is unfolding in front of you and then when you leave the place, the scene ends and there is a story that you can take away. How does anthropology and visual arts work together? When I was looking at your blog, there were so many things that I found really interesting but I felt I do not understand them yet. I believe that through a conversation with people who are interested in similar things one can realize what are the connections or what things really are.

Anne

Yes, for myself it’s been a very short time I came to figure out what I am actually doing, I have been accused of doing nuts for a long time. People imagine I am doing everything at the same time, because I work in transmedia. But I have a very strong intuition that what I do is what I have to do. And when I come to feel the shape is perfect, it’s done. Otherwise, my work is always in process. I do also work in conversation with people, I use this methodology of conducting interaction with people and I also use the theatre skills because I direct theatre. So now I come to gather people around and ask a question, to help people to express themselves, the process of the conversation, I think it’s very much interesting to process knowledge this way too. And I think it’s really right what you have just said that when you leave the place, you can pick up a story and make it for yourself. And then after twenty different stories you have a meaning because people can make a link between the things.

I wrote something this morning. Because I had the same problem, I am writing about chamanism and digital avatars. It’s kind of double extremes of a life. And I wrote something.

‘The difficulty to be a visionary, someone who is a visioner, is that you carry some strategies, some kind of constellations of places and some passage, passage that others who are not visionaries ignore, are unable to see, perceive or capture. And somehow you come to feel lonely, because all the rest of the world around you is like deaf, but somehow you feel very strong of your ideas and images. The visionary is camping in the state of mobile and pricarity, the pricarity comes from ignorance of others. The incapacity of communicating are as many bridges that separate us from

the rest of the world –they are like non-places, and there are the ones of majority. The absence of relation makes the absence of places.’

Dominika

How often do you go to South India? Anne

I used to go every year for the last ten years. But this year I cannot go because I am working on a project for a cinema artist. So I am on a shooting, I am staying around.

Dominika

Do you think that your ability to see things there and to observe them is changing as you get to know the place better? I feel that there is almost some sort of privilege to being a stranger. It can be quite limiting as you do not know much about the place but then one is also able to see what people who live in the place do not pay attention to anymore.

Anne

It’s true although the more I know about them I am able to see them. It’s a double process. The first time you come you are absolutely blind of any social cultural background. What you see you interpret, but you don’t always interpret it right, because you do not have the keys for the interpretation. And now, in India, the more I look at things the more I see them because I understand them better. My strategy of going back there, going back and forth, helps me to create particularities, I can see things better now, because before I had so many things I wanted to look at with no explanation at all. If I stay there too long, after six months, yes - maybe I lose my ability to look at things. I look at myself more than I look at things. And that is why I keep moving, even in my day to day life, I keep moving, I am not setting in one place, except when I need to write, because I need to look inside of me. But otherwise I keep moving every three months.

Dominika

It’s quite a nice way, yes - I think that once a person stays at a place for a long time, he/she becomes too involved in making the place. I find it quite interesting as well to be able to move as I studied here in Scotland and my parents still live in the Czech Republic and I was going to other places too in that time. It was nice to come back to Scotland where I was living but never felt that I was completely part of it. And the same happened with the Czech Republic.

Anne

I think that most of the artists move a lot. You need a place where you are based but you do not need such a huge place and you keep on travelling and meeting people. So now you are at the residency?

Dominike

I am in Scotland at this residency. It’s a collaborative research and development residency with other two artists, for a month. Since I have graduated, I wanted to take

a step back because the final year at the university was very much about making and making - I needed to step back and to look into myself, and to research vertically all the things that I was deeply interested, to research them in more depth as opposed to going forward. I have been keeping a blog as an archive for this enquiry since I graduated and later I printed all the pages and I was trying to find what is it that I am interested in, what are the connections, what are the recurring themes. So this month I am taking the time to speak to people, trying to understand some topics better. It has been nice so far not having the pressure of making something but rather creating a more stable ground for the future. I think it’s important.

Anne

Yes, it is important to produce the maximum and the day you have an exhibition you just pick up something. It will appear. I mean we have been talking about that last week with the students an the teacher says you better produce, produce and produce too much and the day you have an exhibition you can make a choice and you will make a perfect meaning out of the thing. But just try to experiment in as many shapes you can and the meaning will appear one day. It’s not like, maybe it’s inverting the process, when you are looking for the meaning before searching for real. When you are searching you don’t know what you are looking at, otherwise you are not searching, you have found already. So it’s bizarre because it’s not something that is assumed in the contemporary society where we need to be functional, we need to have beginning, middle and the end but actually when you work in a process the beginning is the day of birth and the ending is the day of your death, so there is no ending and no beginning.

Dominika

I was in Paris this summer. I could not speak much French when I was there, I have only recently started learning French which is actually really interesting process for me as well. This goes back to how I saw situations as theatre or film scenes, I had a lot of time to sit in a park and watch how people interacted together. For example one time my friend was speaking to someone. And he can speak mediocre French, so I would watch him speaking to this man and then he would translate it back for me but as I was watching them I was creating my own story based on the gestures and the movements and the way the man was looking. It was then interesting to hear from my friend what it might have been that the man actually said. So in the end I ended up with three different stories - what my friend told me, what the man was really saying and the story I created for myself. Or I went to Sacre Coeur and I spent an hour or hour and half there and it really seemed like a theatre to me. I could not understand anything that was said and I would just see people to stand up - so I would stand up too. Then they would sit down, shake hands, they would sing - and the tourist were just circling around them big circle, being completely oblivious to this. It was really interesting. And when the piece finished, the man would go into… you know the box where people go for confession, and it seemed to be the perfect ending of the piece. And the whole setting was so bizarre, gold and interesting. I made sketches of people doing different movements. It was just liberating not being able to speak the language. The words are something that we hold onto in the first place, whereas here they were pushed into the background and I was paying attention to all the things that were always there but not always noticed when you understand the language. Or event the small gestures – in Paris, so many people were doing this [making repetitive sound with lips] or this other one [making another sound with lips] - they would use it when they would not know what to say. Just sounds that my lips cannot do, that I connected with Paris in particular.

Anne

I am making a drawing for you. So, I am doing differential vecteur of « what I see », « what he translated » and « what he says ». I am imagining the scene you told me, I am sitting on a bench and my friend talks to an old man, and I am observing. That’s the situation. And its like a theatre piece because you don’t understand anything. There are three different layers of the same scene, one is what you see, two is what he translates to you and the third is he is saying. You can use Photoshop and you can make a drawing of the story. Differential vector makes the story to change from the perception. Is that clear? I think it’s fun to do it like that. What is the vector of difference between these three stories and I think it’s a good methodology when you play with the variation of perception of things and use the space in between the different layers.

Dominika

I have been writing short scripts about the scenes I saw in Paris, just little episodes. But I think that the theatre is a nice medium for being able to do this kind of work, it has all the basics - the gestures, the movements, the objects, the words.

How do you see Paris? Do you make work about Paris?

Anne

I did two theatre plays ... three. One was about madness and how people get lost and I was working with the same director. We did something about madness, how people become crazy. It is an amazing place for experimentation. It’s very beautiful, you know, you can go to a museum every day. Yesterday I was at the Louvre, just for a walk and a chat with my friend and you go have a café and talk to someone and then you get back to your work. It is just an amazing pool of creation. So I am building my little island inside the big city where I can pretend I live in a forest and I can live in my own world of ideas and dreams. But the city is amazing how many people you can meet and it’s very different from many other cities too. Sometimes I suffer for the lack of connection with people, when you live in India it’s very easy to connect with people, everyone shares with you spaces food, time. Here if you need to see someone it’s just like a mission, people are never free, they are always doing something for themselves. I mean it’s a survival, the time in Paris is passing so fast so you need to be very... I do not know...people are very picky on the way they meet you, to gather.

Dominika

Maybe it’s a thing about cities. The structure, the things the city - the urban demands from us, it’s quite challenging for a human being. And I think Louvre is a good a place to go to observe madness.

Anne

it’s huge Dominika

Yes, it’s huge but also when I was there in the summer, there was the constant flood of people that drags one along and there is so much to see. It’s a little bit like a city, it’s too much and one can get mad from the choice.

I enjoyed your blog very much. It was quite funny process - I had to use the Google translator to see what the content was about. Do you keep the blog for yourself or is it aimed for an audience?

Anne

No I didn’t aim for anyone in particular. Ok, I will explain you the story of the blog, one day I went for my first conference I was 27, I think, and I was in a posh university of Paris, La Sorbonne and I had lot of videos to show and it was my first talk using videos and I could not show the videos at all, so I had to give the conference of out no material. And at that time, we are lot of anthropologist using digital material in the work in the process and I defend the experimental anthropology. I believe we can things together with people, try to figure out the sense of it instead of figuring out meaning without much talking to the people. Basically if you look at the history of anthropology, people come there and they observe and they make a sense out of things but they are not really part of the process. Myself, I try to make people do things with me, and the moment we collaborate to make a picture of ourselves doing something together. Anyway, as the video projector didn’t work, a friend of mine gave me a blog and said now you can write. I think it’s nice because people come to talk to me. But it’s not a precise thing.