Essay PAUS ISTU MINE: a standstill that oscillates

FIRST THINGS FIRST

While preparing to write this text about PAUS ISTU MINE by Keithy Kuuspu, a common trend on the internet caught my attention: almost any article I found included an estimated reading time right at its beginning. This seems to be a strategic move to encourage readers to engage with a text, a way of reassuring them that the time investment needed won’t be as much as they might have initially thought.

If you are looking for the reading time of the following text, I am afraid you won’t find it.
I choose not to include it because I don’t think you should be persuaded; if time is short, you might prefer to return at the page later; if adding it to your to-do list becomes a burden, I’d rather you prioritize rest.

You will encounter many *pause*(s) throughout the text. *Pause* is a suspension of thoughts – a gentle suggestion, an instruction without exclamation mark. The *pause* remains open-ended, adaptable in length (surely, this is not a classic music score); it might last for seconds, minutes, or even stretch to an entire day if you so desire.

While this text can be approached as a continuous flow, if you’re inclined towards a more performative reading, I offer you the following suggestions.
Whenever you come across the word *pause*, you might opt to:

–    close your eyes for 5 seconds, then return to the text. This task is called BLACK OUT.

–    notice your thoughts passing and look for the moment between them, when one ends and the next begins. This task is called MONKEYS’ JUMP.

–    take a deep inhale and hold your breath as long as you can – without straining. This task is called DEEP DIVE.

–    take a 30 second cold shower. This task is called IMHOFF 2.0

–  take a walk in nature but leave your belongings at home. This task is called DRIFT.

NOTE: You can use any of these tasks at will in your daily life, anytime you encounter the word *pause* either spoken aloud or in writing. The consequences might be transformative.

NOTE from March 2022

While walking in the forest, Keithy asks me to be on board, once again. It is cold in Keila-Joa.
Nature, a canoe, and a river. Fake snow. Maybe butterflies? – she says. And a washing machine. It will be in August. 

I take some vague mental notes; my rational dramaturg’s mind immediately wants to ask, understand yet I remain silent, curious. I let the dream unfold.

Paus Istu Mine (Stand Still in English) is a work in constant movement, despite its title. It oscillates.
Living between being an installation and a performance, its nature is hybrid, and its structure built upon a constant shift between two poles. The vague memory of a seesaw…

Limits and contours appear difficult to define right from the very beginning of this performance, and not solely because of the overwhelming amount of haze that fills the space: the colors are washed-out by a flat light, the reflections on the floor make it appear wet while feet remain dry, the sound of crickets of a summer night follows the audience indoor, yet it hasn’t been previously heard outside. Ladders lay against the walls, their upper limit hidden.

Paus Istu Mine, in its waving motion, is also a work in search for stillness, hence its title. It claims to be a frozen fragment of time, stolen from the fast-paced flow of the everyday and put under a magnified glass. A testing ground, a laboratory. Or perhaps a lepidopterarium (1), since butterflies appear at times, yet subtly, across the room.

The iridescent floor vaguely reminds of a microscope slide filled with colored gels, or a soap bubble, or just the base for a dreamy landscape. The contours, unclear, are hard to trace. 

The choreographer Keithy Kuuspu has long been interested in stretching the boundaries of time in her work, and Paus Istu Mine is no exception: multiple durations and temporalities coexists as collaged together, rather than sawn in an organized matter. The presence of a timer on a machine, the performance of mundane actions, very slow movements cut by sharp flights, hint at the subjective nature of perception, questioning it.

The beauty of this all construct is what immediately catches the eye, although it is surely not the rational, geometrical Greek beauty it refers too. The mesmerizing feeling lives in a sort of tension, a push-pull action of the mind that tries to understand while being presented with slightly absurd objects. The tall ladder that reaches the too high ceiling scares and amazes simultaneously. A tug between attraction and repulsion.(2) Where does it end?

NOTE from August 2022

Keithy calls to update me about the development of her ideas. 

She mentions a longing, the nostalgia for a feeling of surprise mixed with fear, a sense of being part of everything but simultaneously realizing to be infinitely small. An experience of 

 Sublime, I believe that’s the word you are looking for – I interrupt without letting her finish the sentence (bad Italian habit). We remain quiet and while she thinks, I think in turn. When was the last time I felt in awe?

(Glossary)

The sublime refers to a quality in art, literature, or nature that evokes a sense of awe, admiration, and even fear due to its vastness, power, or intensity. It’s often associated with experiences that are beyond human comprehension or control, invoking a mixture of fascination and humility. The sublime can evoke feelings of astonishment and an awareness of the limitations of human understanding in the face of something immense and incomprehensible.

THE WASHING MACHINE’S TIMER ALWAYS LIES TO ME

Am I the only one who falls for the washing machine’s timer trick? It always displays just one minute left, but somehow that minute ends up lasting forever. I never know what it is that pushes my perception to the limit, boredom, impatience or just technology?

“The sublime (and if I may add, the uncanny too) is an emotion of the subject at the limit” – Nancy (3) writes. According to the French writer, the encounter with the sublime is able to disrupt our sense of time, challenging not only the conventional separation between past and future but also weaving the threads of duration and perception. Reason falters and certainties begin to crumble; the stable coordinates of time and space are lost. (4)

The encounters with the sublime (and the uncanny) are what allow the performance to live on the edge, yet experiencing these feelings is not an end in itself in Paus Istu Mine. They are instead used as instruments, aids employed for the creation of what most of us seem to long for: a moment of *pause*.

When rationality fails, we can deny, or we can surrender. The impossibility to make sense of what we encounter asks us to adopt a different type of focus, sharper, sustained. 

When expectations fail and the contours between real and fake gets confused, we have no other anchor than the present moment. For an incredibly short timespan past and future collapse into a single point and, in response, we remain in a vacuum, suspended. We reach a *pause*.

NOTE – January 2023

In Turku, we encounter silence. We stay at a residency in a desolated part of town, surrounded by snow that makes every sound quieter. People seem to live in slow motion here.
On a sunny day, we take a walk on the riverside and remain looking at the shimmering sunlight making patterns on the water, ever changing. Then Keithy takes a photo, and we are off to get a too-pink-too-expensive donut. 

 Walking home, we see a chase. A teenager crossing the street followed by two cops, entering and exiting a parked bus, runs between the sidewalk and the almost empty road. A scene worthy of an action movie. 

Although we recognize the picture – we have seen it many times on TV, we are puzzled. There are no skyscrapers, no loud noises. Can this be happening in Turku?

The scene feels strangely familiar and simultaneously off, mundane yet so bizarre. Uncanny. For a moment which feels an hour, we stop the stream of your thoughts and hooked, we remain to watch. 

(Glossary)

The uncanny is a term used to describe something strangely familiar yet unsettling or eerie. It’s the feeling of encountering something that should be ordinary, but has taken on an unsettling quality. Sigmund Freud in his essay “The Uncanny,” discussed how certain objects or situations can provoke a sense of discomfort due to their uncanny resemblance to something else or their blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy.

Example of the uncanny: déjà vu (a situation that feels intensely familiar even though it’s supposedly being encountered for the first time).

FAKE TANS AND COLD SHOWERS

The short film Alles mine by Austrian artists Lena Schwingshandl and Lisa Großkopf, is shot in the Tropical Islands Resort situated in a former airship hangar, approximately 50km south of Berlin. The resort is a meticulously crafted tropical environment where visitors can indulge in a weekend escape or a long vacation, moving between multiple “destinations” within the same building, each offering its own ad hoc accommodations (a tent, a bungalow, a cottage…)

The film’s camera angles blur the boundaries between real and man-made, as the Europe’s largest artificial rainforest coexists with the surreal backdrop of the hangar. This contrast evokes in me a powerful sense of uncanniness, and looking at the footage I can’t help but feeling torn between amusement and disgust.

 The doubtful authenticity of what is perceived is one of the most common triggers for the onset of the uncanny, and in Paus Istu Mine the interpolation between natural and fake plays a crucial role in the suggestion of it. Stage objects, light and sound allude at the outside world seemingly neglecting their artificiality, while grass and ice look as only imitation of reality.The frustration of imagination to grasp what it is witnessed sharpens the focus and, as a blade, aims at cutting the flux of unrelated and overrunning thoughts swirling in the mind.

I return to the image of the Tropical Islands Resort as I believe it superbly functions as emblem for the tempting promise of the capitalist system: everything we desire, whether it’s a visit to Amazonia minus the lengthy flights, bothersome insects, and unpredictable rain, or any other aspiration, seems just one purchase away. All our needs, however diverse, can (apparently) be met. 

The routine is the following: we work (too much), we make money (never enough), and exhausted we spend them on hollow promises of relaxation and entertainment. We invest in extravagant Himalayan treks or in the last silent camps founded by celebrities, only to find ourselves disillusioned when we realize that the feeling we yearn for, the very ability to *pause*, remains distant even on an exotic island.
Reaching the peak of a mountain or looking at the sun setting over the sea, as many other moments of sublime that once left authentic and transformative, are now only one more thing to be commodified and packaged as mere entertainment. (5)

The criticism of the consumerist system is played more or less openly throughout the performance and appears more forcefully when the performers stage an auction. Borrowing the fast-paced chant of Texans auctioneers, they play with the absurdity of the capitalistic game by trying to sell to any willingly audience member a piece of the scenography. The object which transcends its physical form, becomes an amulet charged with potential, a piece of the universe where to *pause* seems ultimately possible. 

The outburst of fast bets and almost ungraspable speech both disorients and captivates, enhancing the oscillation between pleasure and repulsion. Expectations are once again challenged, and comprehension put to the test.

Just as the limit of loudness and absurdity appears almost reached, another boundary dissolves, allowing the external world to seep in from the main door, and as when a dam (6) is let open, the force of the sublime silence overflows.

SMILE – BUTTERFLY (7)

If you’ve been fortunate enough to witness the birth of a butterfly, you might agree with me that it could be classified as a sublime experience. While the insect’s beauty is undeniably striking, the whole process of becoming holds an aftertaste of bitterness, a haunting echo of mortality. The metamorphosis from a worm into a butterfly requires the caterpillar’s body to undergo the complete breakdown of its tissues, to later create new structures. 

The butterfly’s struggle to exit its chrysalis, the *pause* required for its wings to dry and unfold occupy the liminal space where pleasure and pain seem to coexist. 

In mainstream culture, butterflies are associated primarily with beauty rather than with the sublime. We find them tattooed onto skin to symbolize freedom and hope or featured on fashion items as emblems of femininity. Their presence is slightly cheesy, childish, although their popularity appears to be evergreen.

The butterfly’s symbol within Paus Istu Mine seems to be used with playfulness and repulsion interchangeably: it is noticeable on the performers’ shirts, vaguely referenced by one of the women hanging from the ceiling, and suddenly materializes in the space, outlined by a laser light. It is unclear whether this symbol hints at the fleeting nature of the young performers’ beauty, or whether it is utilized to challenge its symbology of excessive, or violent, positivity as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han defines it in the book Topology of Violence. 

Extreme positivity materializes not only as inspirational quotes, but more profoundly in the values of overproduction, overcommunication, hyperattention, and hyperactivity in today’s culture. 

Han, known for his definition of our “burnout” society, observes that the constant doing and excessive achievement are its most valuable currencies. 

Moments that seem “empty” lacking apparent activity, are swallowed up by the next task on our to-do list or additional hours of scrolling. Our schedules overflow, yet they rarely accommodate the simple act of being in the moment or the radical notion of leisurely loitering. As a result, we seem to have unlearnt the art of living in the present. 

The possibility for the performers to simply exist in the performance space returns like a recurring déjà vu throughout the 90 minutes of its duration, assuming various forms and arrangements. These moments of apparent *pause*, neither quite action nor preparation, paradoxically emerge as some of the most mentally demanding for both the audience and the performers, who are faced with boredom, with not doing. 

The visibly more active fragments of the performance might, on the contrary, become the real *pause*, the break from what the Buddhists would call the monkey mind. These might allow the surfacing of new ways of attuning to the space, creating the conditions for the sublime to manifest, the stillness to be finally felt.

CREATING CONDITIONS or embroidering patterns with invisible threads

“The discourse of the sublime is tainted by association with both malevolent politics and inauthentic mass culture”, writes Simon Morley in the introduction to the book The Sublime published by MIT Press (2010) (8). He refers to, for instance, the use of sublime rhetorics by totalitarian regimes to seduce the masses, or the current abundance of devices that trade on the substitute experience of the sublime.
As a result, many contemporary artists have chosen to distance themselves from this subject, although not all of them. Artists inclined to invest in the uncanny and the sublime to create their artworks have adopted various methods and strategies that set them apart from the subjects used in the past.

The employment of scale has, for instance, been the tool chosen by Milla Koistinen in Magenta Haze, dance performance in which both dancers and performers coexist with large brightly inflatable objects. In Uncanny Valley Girl, choreographer Angela Goh uses self-massage tools, technology, and the image of the Fembot to shift between living and inanimate, pleasure and horror. Jacob Kirkegaard in the sound installation MELT, creates an illusory atmosphere through light, scent, haze and sound to take the audience to a minimally hinted tropical environment. However, when the soundscape that seems to be of a rainforest reveals itself as recordings of ice melting, the uncanniness arises.

I consider these works to be audacious, as they rely on the arousal of highly subjective and hard to predict feelings, such as the sublime and the uncanny. What becomes evident is that each of these works, including Paus Istu Mine, prefers at the fabrication and commodification of such feelings the creation of a space, and thus the conditions, for them to appear.
Although employing different strategies, these artworks create unique universes in which audience and performers cohabit for a defined length of time, and the space in Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava is no different. What this universe is never becomes clear in the unfolding of the performance, leaving the possibility to the audience to fill (or feel) a gap, to encounter their own limits, to become comfortable with not knowing.
The sublime and the uncanny no longer serve to merely impress or persuade, but as stated by Barbara Claire Freeman in The Feminine Sublime “the most enduring commitment would be instead to sustain a condition of radical uncertainty as the very condition of its possibility […]”  (9)

In constant movement, Pause Istu Mine is a flirt between what we expect, what we imagine and the abyss of what can’t be known. Is this a mirage, an auction house, or a test?
Feel free to choose if you need to, but before doing so we might ask you, one last time, to *pause*.

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1 A lepidopterarium, also know as butterfly house or conservatory, is a facility which is specifically intended for the breeding and display of butterflies with an emphasis on education. 

2 Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1978); trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

3 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘L’Offrande sublime’, in Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Courtine, et al., Du sublime. L’extrême contemporain (Paris: Belin, 1988); trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) 

4 Simon Morley, “Staring into the contemporary abyss: The contemporary sublime”. Originally published in “Tate Etc.”, September 2010

5 Herbert Marcuse in his book “One-Dimensional Man” (1964) already noticed and criticized the commodification of sublime experiences by the market.

6 Jacques Deridda describes the experience of sublime with the image of a dam. “In the experience of sublime, differently from the experience of beauty, the pleasure gushes indirectly. It comes after a suspension that keeps back vital forces. The retention is followed by an outpouring.”
Jacques Derrida, La vérité en peinture (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1978); trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

7 Reference to the youtube video of the song “Butterfly” by Smile. 

8 “The Sublime”. Documents of Contemporary Art”. Edited by Simon Morley. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010)

9  Barbara Claire Freeman, “the feminine sublime: gender and excess in Women’s fiction” (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995)