• 
• Roberta Myszkowska (Poland)
  video installation (4 screening projections) and performance

  The Higher School of Arts (MSKH), Yerevan
  October 19, 2014

  This project has been realized in the frame of the ‘Art Commune’ International Artist-in-Residence Program (ACSL) and funded by the European Cultural Foundation

Artist Statement

I realized an artistic project ‘Figure.Territory’ in collaboration with groups of people. I did a series of videos with contemporary young dancers, trainers, performers of the Armenian Parkour Freerunning Federation, Fire Style Crew and Baardia Dance (Movement Therapy) Studio. The series refers to the particular space, which undergoes a natural process of change and transformation. I also searched current relationships between different forms of movements and creation in the context of the city – Yerevan.

WATCH OUT! is an artistic research project by Roberta Myszkowska (Poland) which embraced meetings-in-dialogs and collaboration between the artist and non-artistic communities and contemporary young dancers, trainers, performers of the Armenian Parkour Freerunning Federation, Fire Style Crew, Baardia Dance Studio as well, as a group of young architects whose activities can be defined as desire to change the status quo of urban spaces in Armenia.
The Parkour Freerunning Federation have been realizing interventions in the deserted parks, complex of drained fountains and abandoned city-scapes which are forgotten and felt into ruin places.

The Fire Style Crew and the Baardia Dance Studio combine ballet and various forms of break-dance techniques and therapy. They also have been teaching those specific treating classes combining therapy and dance.

Activities of young architects of Armenia go far beyond the mainstream architectural design as they take efforts to protect the remains of the modernist architecture of the Soviet time in Armenia (and not only), symbolizing the cultural resistance of Armenian intellectuals of that period.

The other aim of the long-term inter-action and cooperation of Myszkowaska and the above described groups is to capture the intersection of the art and non-artistic activism in term of participatory art as well, as particular interests of the artist in inter disciplinary body of art production. The result of this collaboration is going to be shown in form of a video installation and performative actions. The final show of this collaborative project will take place on the renewed roof of the Higher school of Arts (Mekhitar Sebastatsi Educational Complex) where the ‘Art Commune’ (ACSL) Residency cluster is located and organized by ACSL and where the artist spent her 3 months residency stay.

During the renovation of the school’s roof and the whole building of the school a series of video documentations was created by the artist and performative actions were done. In accordance to a Myszkowska’s statement the collaboration with the non-artistic communities is concretized only in perception with pointing and revealing its various levels. Contemporary relationships of different forms of movements and creation in the context of the city have been captured in the artist’s project by referring to the ‘common roof space and to mirroring similarities’. The roof of the Art school turned into a base for the actions, new forms of communication and a new space of creation. Changing surface and places of radical motions-actions to which the project participants are not accustomed caused a sense of danger or uncomfortable use of space. The other hand, the roof has become a symbolic place on ‘what is to be destroyed, reconstructed and built again’, it also refers to nowadays urban and architectural transformations/ distortions in Yerevan.

The project will be also presented (second stage) in Poland with further work on the gathered materials and using documentation of the exhibition in Armenia.

Roberta Myszkowska (Cracow, Poland) is a young performer, installation and video artist. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow with further taking of a Master degree in the Drawing Studio at the Graphic Department of the Academy in 2011. She is a winner of a young artist scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. She also was funded for a project ‘Drawing as a Desiring Machine. Reinventing the city’ in Salzburg (Austria), 2012.

Acknowledgments:

Mekhitar Sebastatsi Educational Complex
Baardia Dance Studio (Movement Therapy) and Hasmik Tangyan
Fire Style Crew and Lia Hovakimyan
Parkour Freerunning Federation and Narek Avoyan
UrbanLabYerevan and Sevada Petrosyan
Ani Arzumanyan (architect)