The title is translated to ”the one who blathers”. Long-winded talking with no real substance. Neither listening nor being present was the muse of the performance. An experience encountered in the mundane. Speaking without interaction: Have you ever been stuck as the involuntary recipient of a monologue disguised as a conversation? Have you ever been the talking head, not listening to the counterpart of the so called discussion, but just blathering on?
Horisija was shown in North Tipperary Ireland on 15th of June 2024. I was attending the considering time residency in Live Art Ireland with workshops led by Marilyn Arsem and Mark Leahy. Marilyn’s workshop concentrated on duration and Mark’s on creating, reading and performing scores. After the workshop we created a day full of durational performances.
I did Horisija, talking for two hours without pause. My location was the old barn midst renovation, located next to the old Milford house – an old house with much history. I was very drawn to the barn. The minimalist aesthetic pleased my purpose: the minimalist act of just speaking, the walls were interesting: on them were writings by the IRA. After my stay at the mansion I studied Ireland’s violent history of the 1900’s.
A non-stop talking performance was something I had desired to do for a long time. My original plan was to talk for four hours, but I shortened it to two hours due to being overworked. The two hours went by quite shiftily. It was surprisingly easy. I felt good, I felt like I could keep going for longer. But right then and there I did not want to.
I wanted to try to talk in all languages I am capable of maintaining a conversation in. Those include Finnish (my native language), English (a strong language) and Spanish and Swedish (basic and skills). Not being able to stop for pause made it difficult to speak in the weaker languages, because with those I usually need some time to search for words. So, I did not use Spanish of Swedish for more than a sentence or two.
Using Finnish in the performance was surprisingly exhausting. There were none in the audience who could comprehend Finnish, so, when speaking in my native tongue, I got little to no response. This facto fact made it more difficult to maintain the continuous trail of thought. Whereas in English I received laughter, questions and thoughts that made the speaking easier. This said, in the two hours I mostly spoke in English.
Pictures 1-4 by Marianne Marcote
Pictures 5-6 by Marilyn Arsem
Pictures 7-8 by myself before the show
horisija maximum
In Ireland I kind of promised to the great Marilyn Arsem, that I would do the Horisija performance for four hours at some point, somewhere, to try it out. So I did in Pori, Finland, in an experimental music festival called Narraus fest.
The festival had two stages for music. So I took my own little stage into the woods. There was this statue park next to the old radio station where the festival was located. It was far enough, so the music would not be too loud over my babbling. I was concerned of the possibility, that I would be talking for four hours by myself. I was afraid that if that had happened I would have cheated. To help me get some audience, the festival workers Katriina and Kreetta made signs to point out my performance in the woods. I was lucky enough to a surprisingly big amount of audience through the whole four hours: sometimes you could even call it a crowd, and people stayed in spite the heavy rain poured upon us.
Many came back and back again, stayed for a while, and some I had conversations with. I encouraged people to ask me questions, but I said that I might not be able to hear them, because of the nature of the performance: I must keep producing words from my mouth. People repeated the questions until I got the jist of the inquiries to be able to answer. Some people came just in the beginning and then to the very end. It felt like seeing someone I had not seen in a long, long, long time. The experience was sort of psychedelic.
At one point a very drunk person came to sit in one of the audience chairs right opposite from myself. I had placed the chairs close to my own, so the audience, and the person in particular, were quite near. The drunk person repeatedly referred to me as ”a sick bitch”. First I got only startled, but I did feel very uncomfortable. I had made limitations for myself of not getting up the chair I was sitting on. The person being drunk and very close made the situation feel intimidating, even with a lot of audience around. I also felt anger rising.
I asked the heckler to leave. The person was crossing a boundary of mine, and I felt that I will stop the performance if he keeps going. It felt so good, damn. The person left with good graces, no problem. And even though intimidated, I did have a safety net: the rest of the audience present at the time. I had a sensation of them all being on my side, protecting me. They too asked the person to leave, and called security, which stayed close by for the rest of the performance.
Marilyn said to me, which I thought to be, that when talking for four hours, you might reach depths in the output of thought. Implicating talking of childhood, secrets, etc. That hardly happened. The audience varied throughout the four hours, so that kept me from going to the depths of my inner self: I repeated myself quite a lot. If the audience were the same for the four hours that would be a whole other story my homie…
A person I had a discussion with after the performance told me that at times it did not really matter what I was saying. My tone was interesting to listen to -it sounded like music they said. I spoke Finnish throughout the performance. If I would have heard English from the audience or if someone had spoken English to me, I surely would have switched languages.
I asked the audience that they would not tell me the time. When three hours had gone by some one had just said that there is not much time left, I thought they meant like ten minutes. Then I saw it by accident from an audience member’s huge digital wrist watch. I freaked a bit. I wanted to seriously shout, and maybe I did a bit. An hour left felt too much. But but after the first wave shock, happened as always: time morphed in to one big nothing, and soon enough my alarm clock went off. I was finished.
People clapped and then I kept on sitting in the chair. Some people tried to ask me some questions, but I was finished with the talking. I left. I heard afterward, that the ending was very anticlimatic. So perfect.
Here is a little video from Narraus fest’s instagram.
Picture: Katriina Sjöblom
the works 