It’s not a Place, It’s a Shape
by Piibe Kolka
synopsis
Andy and Piibe were friends, two Estonians in New York, two generations apart, with shared interest in performance, video and dance. Andy was a woodworker and had also been one of the founders of The Kitchen art space in 1970s. Piibe is a filmmaker and artist and she wanted to create something together with Andy.
Now Andy has passed away but Piibe is still attempting to do something together. By relating to Andy’s archives of early video and performance trials at The Kitchen and her own images and experiences of New York City she is building a performance-film that asks about presence and disappearance, the captured and the fleeting, memories in movements and the shapes we each make during the brief time of the body on earth.
Aug 1, 2019, an email from Andy to Piibe: […] Nice to hear from you. Last week I went to a park near Chelsea to see a butoh performance, where a 3 year old girl repeatedly wiggled away from her mother and tried to join the dance of the almost unmoving performers. I was too slow to record it, even though she kept on going back multiple times. […] Andy Männik is a 85-year old dance loving carpenter in New York City who became one of the founders of the avant-garde art space The Kitchen. It was established in 1971 when video and sound artist couple Steina and Woody Vasulka got together with Andy to establish a space for performance and nascent video art experiments. Andy and I met six years ago and bonded over shared love for contemporary dance. Before getting involved with The Kitchen Andy toured as a carpenter with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. As the only morning people in the group Andy and Cage became good friends over breakfasts and shared a sensibility of looking for chance, unexpectedness and untamed moments that would make an artwork truly alive.
Like a small child repeatedly joining butoh dancers in a performance. To explore what these notions mean to Andy, I proposed to him a game – a series of situations in New York City in front of the camera, that are setups for chance revelations, frameworks for improvisations, moments for something new to emerge: I ask Andy to join me in butoh dance class that I have practiced for years and that we have seen many performances of together. Andy thinks he can not dance. He is trying to teach me some woodwork – his craft that he would like to pass on. We go on a quest to make the best pasta carbonara, hunting down the recipes of all the famous NYC chefs whose barcounters he has built over the years. We organise a dinner party with friends, dress up and play a maffia game where participants personas and real-life personalities start to mix. We go on a film set in Bushwick where Andy is an extra as a Serbian peasant in the 1950’s. After he talks about his characters history that starts to mix with his childhood memories of Estonia and US army service in France in 1957. These scenes are partly preplanned, but the outcome of them will be left to chance and revealed as they unfold. Throughout the film they are juxtaposed with scenes of archival footage from the Kitchen in 1970s. Andy and his peers filmed performances and directed happenings for the camera. The material quality of the early video will be one of the visual elements of the film contrasting with the contemporary digital footage, as the New York of Andy’s youth contrasts with the current city. We learn how he became the background force, facilitator and a friend of many significant figures in the avant-garde, never becoming an artist
biography
Piibe Kolka is an artist, filmmaker and film worker with a background in anthropology. She works with video, sound, movement and writing, presenting work in screenings, installations and participatory performances. She is interested in artists’ moving image as a personal inquiry into the bodily, temporal and rhythmic aspects of social realities, currently she is working at the intersection of performance and cinema. She has studied anthropology at Tallinn University in Estonia and filmmaking at The New School in New York. Most recent works include collaborative installations in Estonian Contemporary Art Museum show Rooms in Rhymes and Estonian National Museum’s show Who Claims the Night. Her film-performance Cellula Filia was presented at an expanded cinema program at Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage 2022 and screened at Whitechapel Gallery among other festivals and venues.