5 min pitch I prepared for an interview last year:
“On 18th June, around 1 pm, when I read an email about this interview, I was with my current research group around the table, making the schedule for the events for “victories over the suns” that started taking place this Monday. I immediately got in panic when I read about the timeframe of 15 min. I extended this panic googling to learn about possible meanings of the word ‘pitch’. Also excited about this new word because for me it is also a new form of presentation to deal with.
Then I understood that to be in accordance with my proposal and practice, this interview has to be the material to work with. And so this interview begins already back on 18th June when I read the email. I started making notes regularly projecting on this moment what would be important to say.
Sina was playing from his computer some Norwegian death doom metal music, telling us about the workshop he did with young feminist artists where they learned how to growl as an empowering vocal practice. I had this great idea to do it here today – to growl the essence of my research proposal.
I put (not enough) effort the next day to learn growling, but the moment of excitement has passed and my vocal style didn’t improve. Nevertheless, I had to write the lyrics for the growling, (some verses I got from an online death metal lyrics generator) and here they are:
I’m a woman from the fringes of Europe
I’m chasing shadows
In the dark
To examine deeply
The anxieties of artistic being.
There’s no end – there’s no beginning
I am searching for materials that are really here
Still opaque and dynamic
To question the politics of exhibiting
To question the art object itself
In my Troubled mind the beating drums
of the institutional critique
Sontag screaming Real art makes us nervous
Looking at it from another point of view
Tinted with feminism
In relation to the new materialism
No one ever hears their warning
In the wisdom of the prophet’s
Never ending tale
Relations are material
Subjects come into being
And objects don’t precede their interaction.
There’s no end – there’s no beginning
for chasing shadows in the dark
to reformulate this field or a part of it.
Taking the context as a partner and its temporal aspect as a co-maker, makes the practice more fluid. And perhaps my skills as an artist are seeming quite unstable while I am learning how to growl to deliver the essence of my proposal, but I think this is a method and a condition that makes possible to imagine otherwise, other possibilities of doing.
And something further and after imagining otherwise, is to make this search possible for the others.
To make a point and summarise, what I did within the last 5 min is:
– found a new artistic anxiety induced with the new form of presentation: the pitch
– created a score or a ritual for making notes, towards the 5 min of performing the research
– explored the vocal technique and lyrics writing in the counterculture, to imagine ‘pitching otherwise’
– exposed my peers and working environment which is situating this thinking
these are the skills, tools and techniques to be explored and shared.”
I still didn’t learn how to growl.