the day following their performance at la central flutura and besnik gave an artist talk, a very generous and personalized artist talk. sharing their struggles as a couple, as a family with first one child…and then twins, as immigrants and as artists. there were many things spoken of but two stand out in my mind:

1) how, through doing their performances an unforeseen aspect of endurance kept cropping up. body endurance. whether it be the endurance of standing for an hour and holding one’s arm stretched out, or the endurance of turning a rope over and over and over while waiting for the technical apparatus to kick in. this is the difference between « imagining » and « doing, » kinda like the difference between theory and practice. even actions that seem super banal can cause stress on the body when repeated and held over time.

2) the other aspect that struck me was how, through speaking of their relationship to embodying the work of the couple ambramovich and ulay, the artists again stressed the difference between « seeing » an image of the work, and actually physically « embodying » the work. how to « know » the work through the body is a very different experience.

this relationship to the body, as a tool for experiencing, for gaining knowledge is central to approaching the work of flutura and besnik. the body in all it’s manifestations is explored through this couple: the body as interrelated to family, the body as in relation to the other, the body as voyager, the body as political expression, the body as mask, the body as artist.

flutura and besnik haxhallari: http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/…/BESENIK.html