MY POSITION WITHIN THE CPPM CONSTELLATION

Central orientation

My trajectory through CPPM is characterised by an increasing attempt to make theory physically operative rather than leaving it as an external framework for interpretation.

Across the programme, philosophical, historical and mythopoetic references progressively move from sources that explain the work toward materials that generate action.

My practice repeatedly asks what happens when an idea is subjected to breath, repetition, exhaustion, matter, image, voice and duration until it can no longer remain purely discursive. This tendency is already visible in Voodoo Child, where Agamben, Bataille, ritual theory, sound, sand, water and bodily transformation are assembled into a performative field rather than illustrated as themes.

The Guest Artist encounters gradually sharpen this orientation. Encounters with Abramović and endurance-based traditions intensify my interest in protocol, duration and presence, but also produce a growing resistance to the idea that physical sacrifice should function as proof of artistic seriousness. Stacy Makishi offers another model in which vulnerability can be structured through humour, care and consent rather than extraction. Ephia Gburek and Marco Donnarumma reinforce a movement away from sovereign rational control toward sensory, material and peripheral forms of cognition. Viewpoints and collaborative devising practices challenge my attachment to strong authorial structures by showing how meaning can emerge from distributed attention. Beuys, Mendieta and later the MAI ecology-related practices deepen my understanding of material not as scenography but as an active participant.

I therefore occupies an unusual position within the cohort. I was neither primarily a formalist nor primarily a psychophysical actor, neither purely process-led nor entirely concept-led. My work tends to begin from dense theoretical or imaginal constellations and then tests whether those constellations can survive contact with matter and the body. Where several colleagues seek to release meaning from structure, I often begins with a strong historical or philosophical image and subjects it to transformation until its original meaning becomes unstable.

My current methodology increasingly depends on several tensions that CPPM made impossible to ignore: authorship versus distributed agency; ritual versus mystification; intensity versus sacrifice; representation versus embodied knowledge; human intention versus material or more-than-human agency. The importance of the cohort lies precisely in revealing that these tensions were not discovered alone. Other students repeatedly occupied neighbouring, oppositional or corrective positions, making my own methodology visible through difference.

The cohort as distributed research environment

The CPPM cohort should not be understood as a collection of sixteen isolated artistic identities developing in parallel. The Weekly Questions reveal something closer to a distributed research environment. The same Guest Artist encounter repeatedly generates incompatible questions in different people. A vulnerability exercise may become a problem of consent for one performer, a dramaturgical score for another, a critique of authenticity for a third and a portal toward ritual material for a fourth. The workshop is therefore only the first stage of transmission. The cohort itself becomes a second pedagogical system because each practice is refracted through multiple bodies, histories and methodological instincts.

This makes influence difficult to describe as a straight line from teacher to student. The more accurate structure is:

Guest Artist → practice → different individual responses → questions → comparison → later artistic development.

Within this system, my position becomes clearer through proximity and difference. Dita reveals how close I remains to ritual, endurance and symbolic transformation, while also exposing the risk of believing that extremity necessarily produces revelation. Anette and Avery operate as different forms of critical resistance: Anette demands precision from ritual and psychological language, while Avery questions the politics of vulnerability and authenticity. Edward challenges the persistence of authorial control. Charis approaches material agency through sensory and ontological routes that parallel mine's later material practice. Leah and Maarja make selective methodological inheritance explicit. Maria, Juuli and Zhenyan each clarify specific tensions around voice, repetition and process.

The important discovery is therefore not that I was “influenced by the cohort” in a vague interpersonal sense. It is that the cohort continuously supplied neighbouring versions of the problems I was trying to solve. Some people confirmed an intuition; others exposed its weakness; others reached the same territory through methods I would never have chosen. My individual artistic language emerges partly through this field of difference.

Individual perspective into the collective

My position inside CPPM became visible gradually because the programme repeatedly forced my own questions to coexist with radically different ways of making. I entered the programme with a strong attraction to images, mythology, philosophy and ritual structures. My instinct was often to construct a dense conceptual or symbolic field and then search for the physical form capable of carrying it. The cohort revealed that this was not an inevitable way of working. Edward could begin from distributed attention; Charis from sensation; Maria from an object's ontological status; Daniel from the destruction of the category itself; Juuli from a minimal repeated gesture.

That difference gradually changed the way I understood my own strengths and risks. I did not stop working through historical or philosophical constellations, but I became increasingly interested in what happens when the body or material refuses to remain subordinate to them. This is one reason the movement from Voodoo Child toward later material and endurance practices matters: theory remains present, but it has to survive contact with physical processes that cannot be entirely controlled.

The cohort also made the ethics of intensity increasingly visible. Dita's proximity to my interest in ritual and endurance showed how easily the search for transformation can become attached to the mythology of the ordeal. Avery's questions about the extraction of vulnerability and Anette's suspicion toward unearned ritual language produced another pressure. Stacy Makishi, MAI and other Guest Artist encounters then became legible not as isolated workshops but as competing models for how a performer might become vulnerable, transformed or exposed.

I therefore do not understand my place in the CPPM constellation as a fixed aesthetic identity. What becomes consistent is a methodological tendency: I use theory, historical images and symbolic structures as generators, but I increasingly need those structures to be altered by material, sensory and relational reality. The question is no longer simply how to embody an idea. It is how to construct conditions in which the idea itself can be changed by the body that attempts to embody it.