Collectif K-LI-P is essentially two artists from different fields, Christel Brink-Przygodda, choregraphic and visual artist, and Phil Veyrunes, visual artist and lighting designer, who wanted to confront their artistic concepts.
K-LI-P is a means to study the manifestations of transversal aesthetics produced through contacts between contemporary artists involved in highly diverse artistic disciplines.
Starting from a given baseline, the artists join forces in an interactive discovery in which the results of each participant question the concept and approach of the other, en route to ashared hybrid creation.
To date, the resulting works, on the fringes of both the performing arts and the visual arts, are intimately related to the concept of performance.
K-LI-P launched its activities in 2005 and the association was founded in 2007.
RATIONALE
At the core of our dramaturgy lie personal memories, our cultural and generational backgrounds, our beginnings.
Our stage direction evolves through the interplay between portrait and self-portrait.
The human body, video, sound, text, artistic installations and lighting are brought into play to question concepts such as migration and identity.
We begin with one autobiographical element, from which we construct a world of movement and visual art.
The art of Walter de Maria, the sound environment from the anglo-american pop-rock music, the abstract work of Merce Cunningham, the installation of Nam June Paik, the performances of Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovic are our roots of art work's inspiration.
CHRISTEL BRINK PRZYGODDA Choregraphic artist Plasticienne
Born in Hamburg, I trained in classical and contemporary dance (Staar and Radlerschool, E. Rastede Cunningham Technic). Very early in my career, I was interested in "in situ" creations and performance. Strongly influenced by the Hamburg and Berlin artistic environment, bodies in the urban space, I create in 85/86 « Parkhaus « , "Berliner Mauer" and « Take a Decision N°1 » in Berlin with dansers, musiciens and visuel artists (Brigitta Winkler, Hans Winkler, Thomas E.Martin, Renata Brink, Elisabeth Molle…).
After a decisive encounter with Mirjam Berns the same year, I left the country to perfect my skills and I started working in companys and specifically with Annie Delichère, Cathy Cambet, Ana Texido, Ruth Meyer (intercultural project Europe, Israel)…
In 1990, I joined the Company 47•49 François Veyrunes in Grenoble and have been working ever since in this structure as choreographic artist, choregraphic assistant and trainer.
Having explored since 2004 different ways of formulating mouvement, I am back to my roots and my intimate concerns linked to my personal history of exile and I trace self-portraits with the visual artist Phil Veyrunes. Together we created the fondation K-LI-P in 2005 to center our research in installation and performance work about our notion of identity.
As for the notion of identity, I define myself as a visual artist as much as a dancer.
PHILIPPE VEYRUNES Visual artist
Meeting the American painter Ben Berns when I was very young made me discover the fundaments of drawing, the rigour of observation and the world of colour. When I was thirteenI flew to New York to see him. Since then, I have continued to learn painting with him.
At the end of my secondary studies in France, I enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts (Ecole National des Beaux-Arts) in Dijon and then did a residency at the New YorkAcademy of Art.
Back in Europe, I met the Dutch light artist Johan Vonk who taught me how to approach colour as volume, a universe where one searches globally. With him, I invested all fieldsnamely show lighting, stenography, exhibition lighting and installations; the lighting of architectural spaces and the creation of light objects and sculptures.
Since that time, alone or in a group, always fascinated by colour, I have mixed and worked with those artistic “mediums”. I group them to better stage them and preserve myexperimentation matrix between life and structure, between nature and architecture, originating in an original scene from my childhood, a starry sky and the vibrations of a city at night.
ARTISTICS TOOLS EGO DOCUMENT PERFORMANCE
“Body am I entirely, and nothing else.”
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The body is projected via dance between the vertical and horizontal axes, it is confronted with its physical limits. Space-time comes into being on the basis of the concept developedby John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Work on articulations, on weight transfer and on identifying physical opposites delves into the very function of movement, its foundations and posture. The physical commitmentquestions the need for the executed act.
*My choreographic "substance" lies in the catalogue archives of my "Ego Body Document"*, in form of video clips created since 2005 in the intimate surroundings of my dance studio.
* "Ego Documents" is a collective concept for any kind of autobiographical self-testimony. The autobiography is more than a self-portrait: It is a retrospective and presents the finding of an individual identity in a narrative or documentary process."
Kathleen Bühler Kunstmuseum Bern 2009
"In the dance studio's intimacy, I hold a diary of the body in front of a (fixed) video camera to collect my instants of research of a performative choreographic material development. This allows me to work out my own choreographic language, linked to my personal preoccupations relating to the body, its memory and its identity.
I define a concept of movement to guide my research based on the artistic tool of performance (body and space and time).
The performative choreographic material comes from a process of structured composition. The structure of the score is precisely refined throughout the rehearsals and leads to a form. Working on reshaping this form questions the created material again.
These numerous takes, currently recorded on DV tapes are as many series of work in themselves than the concrete testimony of a personal commitment. The autobiographical part reveals itself in the way of Portrait/Self-portrait, “the staging of my own existence*”, focused on research work around our notion of identity.
In my journey, I question and transpose in conjunction the personal material towards the collective notion and study its staging in a dramaturgical writing development.
The singular material of the daily shooting of the Ego Document* is selected and constructed in plastic visual modules, answering the current creation questioning's concrete motif. It is an integral part, under various forms, of the video projection in the plastic installation process.”
Christel Brink Przygodda
Ego Document, Christel Brink-Przygodda, studio 2011
Ego Document - Fragments - cell phone
ARTISTICS TOOLS INSTALLATION
"The reference point in my artistic research is U.S. art in the 1970s and 80s. I take over space by modulating the light, I compose visual installations that inevitably result in a loss ofbearings. They offer novel perceptions to spectators.
My work and research deal essentially with objects, their perception and their relation to space. The installation reveals the surrounding space that it includes as a decisive element. By using light, I irradiate space. The context becomes the content.
By becoming one with space, my installations stress the universality of perception because, as noted by Donald Judd, "the three dimensions are the real space".
I create light as a substance, a substance with volume and colour. A colour in space and time. It is mobile, fluid.
By invading space, light transforms it and often dematerialises it. The presence of light abolishes the limits between the environment and the environed. Both become one and the lightinstallation becomes a "situation", and "experiment for new perspectives".
Phil Veyrunes, 2014, may
Draw for Faena Art Center, Buenos Aires - Argentina, 2012
video 2012 -2013
The audience takes part, on its own initiative, in the Performancas well as the Installation. From the given elements, it builds its journey, its own experience of sensory and personal perceptions over the process' time.
We question its state, its freedom to experiment within the installation's space, its relationship to the living, be it intellectual as well as physical during the performance in respect to the work.
It is an integral part of the constructed situation.