A Legend that Becomes Reality
The idea was, in these times of transition, to reactivate the past (traditions) within the present, in order to question the future. An old legend that suddenly reappears calls for reactions and questioning. Within this purpose I was to look for local legends and beliefs that after wards could,through some clues I would point out, be brought back into the everyday life.
(Before starting the project, I wrote down some important aspects that should be respected)
1. First of all, the project should be kept secret from the inhabitants of Nodar. Its power to stimulate would be completely lost if known as “a project”.
2. The legend has to be well known but not too much in order to stay in the territory of magic. Rumour has its job there.
3. The legend can be chosen for its metaphorical power but should not be too “heavy”.
4. The “realization” of the legend has to be as light as possible. A few details, clues… nothing obvious. Rumour has its job there as well.
5. Keeping in mind that what interests us here is not the actual “realization of the legend” but the stimulation it could provoke in the community we should be prepared to make the best out of any other routes and events that surely will happen during that time.
After my arrival in Nodar I spoke with an old village lady and she told me of an old legend: in the mountain facing the artist residency some villagers claimed to have seen flickering lights that were thought to be dancing witches. That’s a very dark location, because there aren’t any villages around,so any light coming from it was seen as a sign of “something strange”.
My initial idea was to use strange sounds, because they can easily be associated with paranormal activity, but we didn’t make it because the nature sound, the river, is very loud. So we came back to the idea of using lights and we went to the Chinese shop and bought cheap LED lights that we placed in the mountain, forming a circle with seven different points. After wards we came back and waited. Later in the evening, we heard a woman screaming and two men speaking about lights-we think we heard the word “bruxas” (witches). We recorded it. Then two men came to speak with us.They wanted to know if we had also seen the lights, since we were in a very good position to witness it. We confirmed we had seen lights and their curiosity in creased to the point of one of them, the youngest and fiercest, having wanted to go there, while his reluctant friend, the oldest,preferred not to. We were asked to go along and we acted to be scared about it. They went alone and took about half an hour to go and come back. While they were up there we could see some of the lights moving and we could hear the voice of the older friend shouting heavy insults. Once they arrived back to the residency we offered them beer and stayed chatting with them. Curiously enough, they didn’t suspect of us and we were surprised they left the lamps untouched. They haddecided to keep playing the game enjoying the fact that all the villagers around would also be scared. We talked about many things and they continued with great enthusiasm talking about the legend of the dancing witches, mentioning facts we didn’t know, about ancient houses in that area.So the first part was over. The rumour was spread and people would now start conversations about the lights, evoking old stories.
What we were to do next was to, in a discrete manner, find the reactions from the villagers at the local cafés. We also decided to leave the lights there with the purpose of keeping the conversations and the storytelling alive. Once the rumours started they gained life of their own, becoming the source for new stories. Now we had the possibility to record those descriptions.
However, after all, I don’t feel documentation is a necessity for the project, I’m not interested in the material remains of the project. The facts are the most important part of it. I won’t show this project anywhere else because there’s nothing to show, the project is what happens now and in this place,and if it happens a few days from now it’s probable I won’t know about it.
Cédric Anglaret is a Paris-based perfomance artist with a focus on public space actions (or non-actions), charged with irony and sometimes almost invisible to the passer-by. In Cédric’s own words: “My stance as an artist is my stance as a human. I am not different from the others. My work is composed of a variety of propositions and invitations to actions, experiments or micro events. Some are collective many are individuals. A thirty minutes blind folded walk, a walk of which every parameter is defined randomly, forty minutes of immobility in a waiting room, invitations to share a smile, extremely slow walk on a daily journey… Once the invitation is sent via flyers, classifieds advertisements, radio or word of mouth anyone interested can contact me. They are the public.”