"Alter ego", performance on web by Leena Kela / From May 5th to June 1st, 2009 / www.elenaelak.com
PERFORMANCELOGÍA: Todo sobre Arte de Performance y Performancistas
Does she sleep on her back, on her side or on her stomach? What kind of dreams does she have?
Does she get easily bruised? Does she like children? What languages she can speak?
Is she grumpy in the mornings? Is she loud?
What is her most embarrassing memory? How about the dearest memory?
Does she feed ducks in the park?
Is she interested in politics? Is she religious? Does she shave her hairy armpits?
Does she ever cross the street with the red traffic lights?
Alter ego
is a durational online performance to be seen in May during four weeks
in these web pages. Performance artist Leena Kela will spend that time
in the character of her alter ego Elena Elak. Elena has her own
apartment, where she has her own furniture, objects, clothes and the
every day routines. She has her own life.
Elena’s life will become half public, since her apartment is equipped with four surveillance cameras, through which the audience can watch Elena’s life in real time. Every day at 6pm she will have a different visitor, who will either talk with her for example about politics or philosophy or teach her new skills as baking, meditation, tap dancing or singing. Through these encounters Elena will widen her social network, learn new skills and at the same time her personality is shaped by these meetings.
Elena’s Facebook profile and her phone number are also public (see the link ‘Elena Elak’). So if the spectator wants, she or he can talk with Elena, who might also meet some of the people she’s been in touch with. Elena will start her own life, which in all of its privacy is public at the same time. For the time of the performance Leena Kela will detach herself from her own social and everyday life, she won’t meet her family or friends and won’t answer her phone or emails. In a sense she doesn’t exist anymore, but her characters will change into Elena’s, who has completely own social networks.
Alter ego is formed during two years, when Kela has been examining her alter egos and social roles in co-operation with hypnotist Heljä Suuronen-Geib and later on spending time as Elena. In hypnosis she has been researching her past lives and found out that she has for example been a Moroccan snake dancer, middle class wife and a hermit forester. These characters have also influenced Elena’s personality.
The performance is examining the possibilities of feeling like another person, having different ways of operating and thinking in every day situations, and achieving different kinds of corporeal experiences, which are still framed by one’s own bodily entity. Where does the feeling of selfhood come from? Is there originally more than one me? Or is it absolutely impossible to create another personality for oneself? What is fact and what is fiction in my own existence? How could I become an Other?
Leena Kela (born in 1979) is a Helsinki based performance artist and the performance Alter ego is her artistic dissertation in the MA program in Live art and Performance Studies at the Theatre Academy Helsinki. In her previous studies she has graduated as Performance Art Pedagogy (Lahti Institute of Design, 2007) and has done her BA-studies at the Crossing Borders in Performing Arts (Turku Arts Academy, 2003).Her performances have been presented in a number of contexts in Finland and internationally in performance art festivals around Europe and in North America.
- Concept: Leena Kela
- Producer: Susan Josipov /Teak
- Sound technician: Kaj Wager /Teak
- Surveillance camera technology: Sami Johansson ja Markus Nuorento / Ip-Valvonta Oy
- Documenting and post-production: Aapo Korkeaoja ja Kalle Kuisma
- Photography, technical consultation and support: Roope Pellinen
- Web programmer: Son Nguyen /Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
The project is supported by Theatre Academy Helsinki, IP-Valvonta Oy,
Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences, M2Hz, AVEK, VISEK,
Samuel Huber Art Foundation and Art Council of Finland.
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