Laura Vallés Vílchez: I would like to begin discussing your latest exhibition at Van Abbemuseum, titled A Daily Practice. The show is the result of a three-year research project on the museum’s collection using the Feldenkrais method as the framework. This somatic method was initiated by the Israeli engineer and physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, and consists of connecting the bodily movements with certain emotional and mental mechanisms. The essence of this method resides in the interaction between a series of coordinated movements developed by the person that practices it through attention and an embodied listening. This affective perspective towards the body and the objects surrounding can be perceived both in the artworks installed in the exhibition and in the participating artists, whose practices have been curated in relation to their corporeal connotations. Can you tell us how the conception of this long-term project unfolded?

Yael Davids: The project was initiated by an invitation from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, for a three year long research programme. The academy was pursuing the creation of an alternative course with a significantly less amount of writing. I had this dream, a kind of longing that I had for a long time to open a school with friends. So I applied to this new educational cycle called Creator Doctus Program (CrD) with the idea of the school.

I was the first candidate of the practice-based doctorate educational project, supported by the Academie and the Van Abbemuseum. The idea that I had was to build a school from the foundations of Feldenkrais’ thinking. I was saddened by the way my daughter was taught at school. Since Feldenkrais addresses the very condition of learning, I applied with these notions in mind.

With this, I began my research away from of my social context in the Van Abbemuseum and subsequently realised the difficulties I was facing in this new social scenario in Eindhoven, whose context or people I didn’t know. When Steven Ten Thije, the collections curator, felt my confusion, he suggested to start with Feldenkrais lessons, which in fact it is a very Felndekrais thing to do; that is: starting with the material, with the concrete, instead of the idea, words. Once a week I traveled to Eindhoven, to the museum to give a lesson, my initial idea, wish was that the entire team of the museum would participate. I wanted to see all the people working there, lying on the floor, because one of the most beautiful aspects of Feldenkrais is that everybody can practice it.

I thought it was interesting to set this project in such a big institution. However, when you work with such big institutions you notice the segregation that exists between different departments, it is quite shocking. Therefore, I considered necessary that all the staff joined the lessons, but unfortunately very few people joined. Few of the curators, very few members of the staff, people from the educational and mainly the volunteers group. We tried to incorporate other departments, but it was impossible. At the time I had just graduated as a Feldenkrais teacher, so the group became a way of learning for me too: it was like my forum, my place to practice.

LVV: The school occupied the two main galleries of the museum, and it was originally conceived of as the place for the Feldenkrais lessons: a beautiful practice in which you learn to learn, and you rehearse bodily curiosity and the notions “right” or “wrong” do not exist. You also invited members from other group you teach weekly in Eindhoven, as well as people close to your artistic practice, to select artworks exhibited in the adjacent gallery. The lessons were inspired by this attentive and intimate artistic collective gesture. Can you tell us about the “daily practice” of the museum? What learnings did you obtain from this research process?

YD: After a while, I started to work with Nick Aikens, the exhibitions curator. By then, I was thinking about the relationship between the museum and care. I thought about how artworks were taken care of, and I was very surprised by the lack of care that was given to the team (who cares for the carer?). The structure of a museum functions like a cocoon: the heart is the collection. The value and much of the concerns of the museum are located there. One of the first things that I learnt from Steven, was the economy of the movement of the works of art, since it has to be very economical and calculated. A clear route has to be drawn beforehand; there has to be a plan for every movement. I found this aspect fascinating because the works are moved as if it were a choreography. Another interesting thing that I learnt was that the artworks cannot lie directly on the floor, or one should avoid, lying the canvas horizontal, you see in this positing the weight of the paint (often oil paint) is most significance and can damage the structure of the paint/canvas.

More importantly, I also learnt that works of art have a body, and we tend to forget this. Artworks and their bodies have other lives that we don’t usually acknowledge. We have a very visual relation with art and this reflection made me think of our limitations. In my creative process, I bring my ancestors, the birds flying in the street, the fight I had with my partner, my daughter. All these parameters are embedded in the making of art, unconsciously. Likewise, when we go to museums, the narrative we see is filtered. It can be filtered through geographical, historical, gender related parameters, it does not matter. It is always the subject of some kind of mediation. However, artistic practice is not that mediated, not even conceptual art. There is something almost erotic in the process of writing, conceptualisation, production; the joy, the sadness and all of these emotions that move us emanate from the inside. In this sense, in A Daily Practice, I wanted to recover the body from the artwork. A friend of mine told me that, when she was a child, she always felt as though she had to “leave” her body when she went to the museum with her parents. This anecdote seemed very visual to me: leave our bodies to look at art. My idea, then, was to revert this notion.

LVV: How does Moshe Feldenkrais understand the changing patterns of movement? How do these patterns relate to the institutional and artistic experience: the way we think, observe, and feel?

YD: One of the things I love about Feldenkrais is the learning conditions that he sets as the starting point. Moshe Feldenkrais was interested in movement and its relationship with the brain. He had a knee injury and found himself on an endless waiting list for the operation, so he started to learn about himself in order to handle his own pain, reflecting on how his body reacted to it. Moshe Feldenkrais believed that we cannot change, as human beings, we haven’t got the possibility of changing. Nevertheless, we can change our patterns of movement; these patterns of movement are patterns in our brain, so, if we change the patterns of movement, the patterns in our brain change as well, and then other things within us change along/with it.

As you said before, Feldenkrais does not encourage you to do something better, since everything you do is already perfect. We work with the brain, exploring the possibilities, we have to seduce it. The brain rejects that which feels uncomfortable, such as pain and effort, which are interpreted in the brain as noise. Then, using micro-movements, the brain slowly takes care of it. A main idea of Feldenkrais is that a good movement includes all parts of the body; there is no one part prior to the other. It doesn’t matter if it’s the hand or a foot, they both have the same resonance, since we need all our body to support us. Answering your question, this implies looking at the body as an organisation. It is a structure, but it is also a social structure. For instance, pain resonates more because it stands out. Having pain often means that a certain part of the body has been overworked, but not that is has a problem. However, it is usually the part that does its tasks better than the others. Then, to help this part in pain, we reduce the movement and invite other parts of the body to move instead.

In a certain way, Feldenkrais is very ecological and a little bit cosmological as well, as the body is a cosmos. In 1964, Moshe gave a conference at a university in Israel on the dichotomy between the spirit and the brain. It was very beautiful because, in Hebrew, spirit (רוח) also means wind and soul. The wind is the soul. Feldenkrais is reticent of this dichotomy, because the foetus in her first week is only the spine, then after few weeks the spine is split into the head and the spine. The neurological system is indeed the spine and the head. Feldenkrais employs the word envelop because the body envelops the neurological system and is enveloped by the cosmos. These are the layers that can be addressed, instead of the mind and the soul separation. This is what I love about Feldenkrais, because once you understand that there is no separation, you take more responsibility of your own movements and position.

LVV: The way of working with the collection was very special. How was the selection articulated in relation to the Feldenkrais lessons?

YD: One of the first works that we used in our lessons was Proun P23 No 6 (1919), by Il Lissitzky. It was selected by Steven Ten Thije, the collections curator. What I found captivating in this painting is the way that objects rest at the painted surface, which seems resonant with Feldenkrais. The lesson begins with a bodily “scan”: we lie on the floor and listen to the comments that the floor gives us about how our body is organised. We lie throughout most of the duration of the lesson because we want the majority of the support of the floor, in order to avoid doing unnecessary muscle effort. We work focusing on gravity and direction. Steven showed me that all the elements depicted in this painting touch each other gently. In Feldenkrais, we learn that touch is a change in weight. One of the reasons why Steven chose this work is that Il Lissitzky gave his permission to spin the painting 180 degrees on its own axis, so my lesson focused on that movement of spinning and rolling: from one side to the other, from lying to sitting. When the painting is hanged in the traditional way, the viewer has a bird’s perspective, looking at the work from above. When we flip its direction and position, we change the way we see (the world).

The works by Il Lissitzky and Untitled (1922), by Laszló Moholy-Nagy, which belong to the collection, became an extension of the school. I see Untitled as a notation of movement. An important aspect of Moholy-Nagy’s practice is his facet as an educator. He was engaged with the Bauhaus School in Weimar and Dessau, and years later he became the director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. I feel attracted by his radical approach. He believed that a full integration of the senses and the intellect allowed an organic development of the individual. When I began my research project, my intention was to move the very moment of the creation of a work from the studio to the museum; a moment in which all the senses, temporalities, stories, narratives and sounds are connected and, in a polyphonic way, they inspire artistic decisions. It is a corporeal and sensual moment that Moshe Feldenkrais names “inclusive attention”: a moment in which one is equally focused on major and minor “abstractions”. This bodily, sensual constellation gets lost often in the encounter between the audience and the artwork in the museum.

As we said, while I was setting up the school, I sent an invitation to artists and colleagues that are connected to my own practice inviting them to participate. We devoted one day to the process of observation and selection of the work, which they had to prepare beforehand, justifying their suggested selection from an embodied perspective. We gathered in the depot and looked at the works. We then had a lesson, followed by another selection and other lesson, and then the same process… It was like a seminar from the artistic practice.

All of the participants (artists, colleagues, staff of the museum) chose an artwork. Wendelien van Oldenborgh selected another Moholy-Nagy photomontage series because of the new notions of space, and the human and no-human bodies that it opened. André van Bergen chose Sand Carpet (1974) by Marcel Broodthaers, telling us about how to lie on the floor to then raising like a palm tree. Willy de Rooij talked to us about the softness and strength in Cadinations by Jo Baer (1974). Grant Watson selected Stairway (2001) by Gülsün Karamustafa because of its relation to mise en scene. Frédérique Bergholtz chose Meat Joy (1964) by Carolee Schneemann. Nelleke Slofstra chose Monochrome Blue and Untitled (1959) by Yves Klein because of their approximation to light and colour. Frédérique Bergholtz showed us the Preparatory sketch for Double Lunar Dogs (1981) by Joan Jonas to reflect on the way that balance and coordination are pursued. I selected the L-shapes by Robert Morris (1956) because of the focus on objects and their relation to the environment.

These works were part of the school among others. Since the selection of the pieces was not only my responsibility, it was not always easy to find a lesson that could be adapted to some of them. We tried to look for points of encounter between the works and the Feldenkrais method, grouping a few of the suggested pieces. I then started to make a series of charts that helped me when preparing the lessons, becoming eventually a sort of independent artwork. ^[1] These charts evidence this law of gravity that articulate the process, tracing the forces that I try to find around the works of the collection. They all connect in their physical appearance in some way or another.

We also requested five loans from outside Van Abbe, five women of my choosing: Adrian Piper, Lee Lozano, Noa Eshkol, Jill Johnson and Hilma af Klint. The rest of the works came from the museum collection. However, although I love it, the collection has quite a political orientation, which gives it a very specific grammar. I feel that the process of creation is less important that meta-ideas and their criticality. Hence, form is not challenged. With this idea on mind, I also selected the work of Anna Boghiguian, because her practice is more about her openness to space rather than a specific narrative. I was looking for this kind of practice in the collection, something like the work of Nasreen Mohamedi, who was included in the exhibition as well.

LVV: A Daily Practice is opening soon at Migros Museum in Zurich. Considering the specificity of the project at the Van Abbe, in which the exhibition was materialised in a choral and expansive way, working with a very specific collection with its own nuances, as well as the circumstances of the pandemic, how have you articulated this itinerancy? How do you think Covid-19 has changed the way we see and feel our bodies? During these last months, Feldenkrais has become a very beneficial practice in times of disconnection and disembodied experiences. How have you experienced this?

YD: When the pandemic started, the exhibition at Van Abbe was supposed to open, so we had to wait until the first lockdown ended to open the exhibition. And when finally Van Abbe reopened, we gave lessons once a week, though we did reduce the number of participants due to social distancing, so it became more exclusive, which I don’t personally like…

In my experience at the Van Abbe, I felt it necessary to host lessons at least once a week; I worked with a local teacher, Marijke. I found it important that the practice stayed once I left the museum. What I often dislike about social artistic practices is the a combination of the temporality of the exhibition duration – the fact that the artists often leave once their work is completed. Then, Marijke kept giving the lessons once a week.

An iteration of this exhibition is happening in the Migros Museum. Working on the exhibition at Migros has been very challenging for me, because I have been unable to work in the same way as I did at Van Abbe. I saw their collection once, but I did not have the chance to get intimate with it. We did all the work via Zoom, hence, it is the method what we have brought to Zurich, not an exhibition. Since the main focus at Migros is the relation to the collection – with very few loans. In Eindhoven, Nick and me spent days giving/taking lessons, talking through, going to the depot… all of this has not been possible in Zurich.

I believe there is something truly beautiful when you lie on the floor of the museum with your eyes closed. Moreover, we could not experience the idea around the body of the work and the many lives that it can take in the same manner.

Regarding the collection, the process of negotiation has also been completely different. It is another paradigm. The project needs another articulation since we work mainly with the museum collection. On this occasion, we have only requested two loans of works made by Jon Mikel Euba and Marlene Dumas. Working with a collection whose criterion of selection is far from yours is quite complex. The curator, Nadia Schneider Willen, is particularly interested in the use of this method in comparison to others – how different is curating the collection using Feldenkrais as the methodology? What it is that is special?

In my opinion, this resides in the idea of the brain’s neuroplasticity that the method addresses, since it generates connections. This is actually what the brain usually does: comparing and connecting. You access a space and start looking for relations between the elements. The process of learning addresses this: you establish differences, find correspondences. The exercise that I propose in the museum sets up a practice that eventually bridges the gap between people and art. When I prepare for a lesson I feel often as a sort of healer or mediator that activates transmissions between the body of the art works, the body of the participant and my own body. As a teacher, I am not supposed to demonstrate anything, but instead guide the students, who have their own particular way of working. I tend to avoid correcting my students, because there is not one singular right interpretation. I only intercede when an indication is not understood well or confused, for example, when I indicate “upwards” instead of “ahead”. Correction is experienced for the brain as a judgement; if I correct someone, their brain can interpret it as rejection.

At Migros we presented an open call, so I did not know the participants beforehand. And the selection of the pieces is interesting: some of the artworks are perfect for being adapted into a lesson, others less so. Migros works through converting the museum into a school. We have lessons three times a week, led by three different local instructors, two women and one man who is very experienced. He himself is a teacher to other instructors of the Feldenkrais method. Conversing with him has been incredible, since he has understood everything very quickly. And at times could articulate it much better than me. It is needless to say that knowledge is linked to practice.

I have always felt attracted to formalism, and now I understand this inclination better. It is an interest on how we are structured and how we gravitate: how do we adjust to each other. In Zurich, we are more specific in the discussion of the works’ points of encounter, the gravity and forces that are found, for instance, in painting and its relationship with the vertical axis. The art world seeks specific themes for the artworks in order to talk about certain topics such as “spirituality”, but I don’t feel it is that explicit and excluded; what I am trying to say is that we create relationships, we try to be open and pay attention, and, in the meantime, something comes to us, and we attempt to externalise it, so it is not even with oneself. As I said before, one is always plural.

LVV: How do you think A Daily Practice has transformed the parameters through which the museum is experienced? What learnings can you recall?

YD: In the first place, we soon realised that the museum is not welcoming to a practice similar to the Feldenkrais practice. The acoustics are not good. For the proper conservation of the artworks, the floor is very cold to the point that is not a good temperature for the body. Van Abbe is working toward facilitating a room taking into account these conditions, having a room specifically designed to learn about the collection in a different ways, with the appropriate acoustic and thermal conditions for the visitors. The designer is to work in dialogue with me.

The second aspect that I learnt doing the exhibition was, as I mentioned earlier, the implications of moving the artworks. You have to usually give a few months’ notice to the museum to move any work, sometimes even a year’s, because moving one piece from one place to another in the museum is a huge operation, something that feels very important in relation to Feldenkrais. Movement is coordinated. Every time we moved artworks for educational activities or the exhibition, there had to be curators and other specialists to supervise the procedure. Once you move a single work, you move the whole museum, or at least a big part of it.

Finally, a crucial thing that I learn after this project is that I cannot go back to do performance as I did before. I cannot detach myself form the context of the show – the institute, the building, the work. It is tough to work with a wider context. Before I initiated the project at Migros, I communicated with them that I expected to operate with a specific sensibility. This is what has really changed in me, it is no longer about the work. There is an artwork, there is the museum and the people who work there. They all are part of the exhibition. My practice always addressed the personal and the political. However, now I find it more structured and in the concrete reality of the exhibition; one cannot do Feldenkrais without an understanding of the context of the museum or the people who work there. You need to create another kind of exchange with everyone that participates.

This journey has definitely influenced my conception of art and the human being. We tend to operate under this strange motor: we push, push, push. And I can hardly face it anymore. Once you change your mechanism, you become more sensitive. I used to be angry and I used to employ that anger as the engine in my work. When I started practicing Feldenkrais, a softness was introduced into my body. It is a very emotional process that implies vulnerability and with this comes a sense of protection; once these mechanisms start to soften, you become sensitive and attentive, you aim for a more integral way of working.

LVV: In 2010, you did the performance Learning to Imitate in Absentia in the same museum, the Van Abbe, as part of an exhibition organised by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. Ladders, a stage, and a rope occupied the space. Ten years later, you invite the visitors to pass by these very accessories as well as other series of hanging sculptures made of glass and bronze. It seems to be an exhibition within an exhibition, so I wanted to discuss this biographical gesture as well. You have also worked with glass for a few years now. In Tzuba, in the kibbutz that you grew up in, the factory of Oran Safety Glass specialises in the production of bullet-proof glass. Kibbutzim are economic organisations but also one of the most important communal movements in history. Can you talk a little bit about this artwork and its materials?

YD: Yes, I did grow up in a kibbutz in Israel: an extremely ideological society. We worked in the fields from a very young age, you created a very tight connection with the landscape. And then there was an economic shift that ended with most of the kibbutz. To face the industrialisation, the people from the kibbutz developed an armour of glass that serves to build settlements, checkpoints, etc. This caused a complicated situation in which they live in without realising the political consequences.

In this moment, I started to think about glass as a weapon. Glass always represents something vulnerable, because it breaks, but you should be careful about it. Israel, for example, is using a state of continuous “protection”, which has become very violent. That made me think about the relation between protection and defence. Also, as a mother, I did not know how to protect my daughter. When I started doing Feldenkrais, I realised that most of our pain often comes from the need of protecting ourselves. If people come to my lesson because they have pain, it is often because they protect something, and protecting something very tightly becomes with the years stagnation for and in the body. I started working on the limits of protection. In the installations, I am engaged with glass: installing it in different positions in the space, hanging it, which makes one feel it is about to fall, break, and get hurt. Glass is scary, but it’s also something we should care for. I know one day I would have to separate from it, but now I started to use it more as a tool, beyond the installative purpose. It reminds me how I work with text – I compose my scripts through accumulation; I keep recycling everything from past works, which we see in the re-presentation of Learning to Imitate in Absentia.

I think the practice of performance is mainly about being in the present and thinking of the implications of this presence.

LVV: In A Reading that Loves – A Physical Act (2017), your work for Documenta, you created a platform made for four women to meet each other. The piece gathered female figures from different historical and cultural contexts that were subjected to different ways of physical or social displacement. How did this work originate? Could you talk to us about the specificity of making exhibitions or about curation from your performative perspective?

YD: On my visit to to Athens, I dwelled in the Archeological Museum and I saw an incredible sculpture, flat and tall (its flatness felts as a result of pressed weights). This beautiful wounded figure was surrounded by many others sculptures that depicted quite perfect men. I was so intrigued by this iamges and started a research about it.

This installation is a homage of the historical figures of Else Lasker-Schüler, Rahel Varnhagen, Cornelia Gurlitt and Julia Aquilia Severa. The lives of these four fascinating women were characterised for attempts at being integrated in the public domain and not adjusting to the established norms in relation to their gender, social origin and appearance. Each of them represented something specific in the performance. I remember how much I researched and loved these women. At first, I did not know how to bring their voices, so Hendrik, the curator, told me to think on the mediation and be with them and channel their presence. It was a beautiful process!

I hanged the copied prints by Cornelia Gurlitt in my studio. I began noticing the various positions that were depicted, various notions of lying, sitting and standing. I started analysing the three positions and their gestures, what they meant physically, politically, personally or socially. For instance, in the occidental culture most things happens in sitting in culture, like signing agreements, talking, learning, eating …

A student once told me that the project didn’t feel like performance art, that it felt like an exhibition. And I thought it was an interesting appraisal that relates to your question. I realised that performance artists have a very different way of making exhibitions. There is a different sensibility to the space, the understanding of the economies of empty spaces, you see performance is never there; that is why I am opposed to video and other forms of documentation in the space. Performance is a loss, an absence, there is an emptiness left in the space.

Notes:

^[1] See Fig. 1 Increasing the perception of one’s body – from toe to head / Force, transmission, reaching through breathing, collages, A1, 2020. Graphics for Feldenkrais lessons.