GOSIE VERVLOESSEM

Maïzena

In the beginning, they started to play with maizena. Bizarre? We’ll see. It appears maizena has unsuspected properties. In fact its fluid behaviour does not obey Newton’s laws. Quickly the play takes over and magic start operating. Connection with maizena is a strange equation; an effort. If you knead it, it will let you, taking whatever shape you suggest. But as soon as you stop, it will take back its formless, sticky, creapy nature. In any case, they try and they try again but it all falls apart in the end.

Afterwards, engrossed in this stubborn object, images impress on them. One woman snatches some. She spreads it on, taps it down, but maizena melts, dripping from her face, and quickly takes over her body. It is the invasion of maizena in a non-Newtonian country. A country where nothing holds, where borders disperse, where territories have no within or without.

But isn’t life a non-Newtonian country? Maizena is an idea and you have to make a huge effort to give it form. So we try to keep, our bodies, our identifications, our perceptions in categories, classes, words. The effort is in the standing up. But it’s not easy to keep the body in shape. For one woman, it turns into obsession. As soon as she lets go, everything falls to pieces, flat on the floor. She tries to hold on to as much maizena as she can. The effort is unsustainable, the body trembles under the shear weight of the irrationality of it all. In the end, she looses it.

But who are they, really? One is a film-maker. What makes her tick is physical phenomena. Rain, potatoes, electricity; whatever elementary thing she can dissect. She reckons that these physical phenomena will finally be delivered the logic of this world for they are what is most real. The other is in war with cranial formatting, standard categories, and tacit agreements. A preposterous idea, this; what if there were another logic?

Together, they resign to the fact that there’s no such thing as logic. It is not for nothing that no one gets it. All we do is try and try again to give it shape, but it always ends formless. Might we not, just as well become maizena?

+ creation and performance: Gosie Vervloessem & Einat Tuchman
+ production: Helga Duchamps/ duchamps vzw
+ diffusion: Mokum vzw
+ coproduction: Dommelhof/ Neerpelt
+ with the support of: VGC, WPZimmer/ Antwerpen, De pianofabriek/ Brussel, Danscentrum Jette