escautville is a production and distribution platform for audiovisual arts

​

Catrysse's point of departure is the exposure of the human body to elementary forces. Not what this body feels at this moment is of greatest relevance, but rather the encounter as such. Bodily action that follows the subjective feeling and translates it into a response. It revolves around the way in which the mental and the material are intertwined, caught in mutual inter-relational response.

​

In Catch-As-Catch-Can (2005), this image of the performed encounter is perhaps most lucid: two male characters oppose one other, as if in anticipation of an attack, while standing on a round platform that is turning at what seems an increasingly high speed. Tension oscillates like an electrical spark between the men and the background, between the suspended anticipation of an attack and the creation of a sensitive equilibrium. As the background passes by, the men have to balance their bodies against the centrifugal forces of gravity. Their bodies are teetering along a thin line in the attempt of mastering the forces they are exposed to: this is an image facing its own collapse, revealing the precarious boundary between control and loss of control. It leads us straight into the heart of the sensory perception through which the forces of gravity, in this case, increased through the centrifugal acceleration, are mastered: the sense of equilibrium, upon which the fundamental order of the world is dependent.

 

Catch-As-Catch-Can makes us travel along the very nerve of the sense of balance, it becomes clear that it represents a primordial structure, giving initial shape to what later we call 'a world'. The coordinates of this world, its dimensions, such as time and space, are jeopardised here and driven to the edge of dissolution.

 

What is demonstrated here is the relationship between the undifferentiated and difference, between background and foreground, subject and object at the moment in which these are endangered and have to prove themselves. The objective is a differentiation of the world through the primal forces that preceded the symbolic system of differences. These are the tactile, affect-based forces in which mind and matter, subject and object are already intertwined with and mutually constitutive of one another.

​

Anselm Franke, 2008

​