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Exerts from dialogue between Krista Connerly and Patricia Reed, curator of "The Momental" at Sparwasser HQ Berlin

PR: One thing I would like to start out by asking, is why you feel the need to address and respond to conditions most people would label banal, quotidian etc, through your work?  Why is this terrain is vital in your work?

In your project Transitory Contacts, where you map out the brief “contacts” with strangers, you have an ongoing diary superimposed on a map of a public transport line.  What is the shift in contact for you that renders a particular encounter a “moment”, something that stands out from the flow of routine events.  Does there have to be a performative difference within your self to initiate such a silent contact?

KC: I will answer your last question first. You ask if there needs to be a performative shift within myself to initiate these contacts with others that happen in my work. It is an interesting question - in general I wonder does it need to be this way? Are the best moments when it is not? Transitory contact came from an experience that happened on a bus - originally the shift was not performative but accidental. It was born from a moment of forgetfulness.

One evening I was riding the bus home and was active in that mostly unconscious process of trying not to slide into the people around me; - working to maintain our individuated spaces - mine, and my seat companions. At a certain point when the bus turned another corner, I kind of forgot myself. I should have kept myself upright; instead I leaned into my seatmate. He didn't make any efforts to move away so I didn't either. I found myself strangely comforted by this contact. I had the feeling that we were collaborators, participating together in something indefinable. I kept myself pressed into his side even after the bus straightened. I allowed myself to experience his body against me -the down jacket as if it was his skin. I was interested in what this felt like - this moment that had always been available to me but which I had never thought to take advantage of. I made a pact with myself at that point to make contact with the person sitting next to me every time I took public transport  - and to do this by pressing up against them. I think at that point the shift did become performative. But in a certain way it became as much about forgetting as performing. What happens if we forget ourselves? Or we forget a set of actions that we have become accustomed too- by forgetting myself I became more aware of myself - the contact with this person next to me. Maybe it's not so much an active shift as a trying to forget - and by doing so - remaining open to the possibilities around you.

The element of performance though is important - you are right. Particular as this project branched out into "Ten letters to Intimate Strangers" where I would actively fall in love with one person that I saw every day (on the bus, in the library, at the bar, etc). This was much more intentional - more emotional labor. At that point I as interested in how the idea of "love" creates these heightened experiences - they pull things out of the everyday and elevate them so that they are given our full attention. I wanted to force myself into these situations. (As a side note: I had just fallen in love and was also reading "the Sorrows of Young Werther" where every moment between Werther and Charlotte becomes rich with possibilities, because everything is about looking for a sign).  I called these experiences "deep acting plays" and I started them with a series of "what if" propositions. What if their words meant everything to me? What if I was waiting for the slightest look or touch? What if their eyelashes could crush me?

It seems to me that a moment becomes a moment when it contains a proposal. What I mean is that - an incident gets pulled out of everyday when it allows something new to form - a new trajectory to happen. I'm having a hard time describing this - Something happens, it may be a memory, a shift in thinking, an event - but it kind of casts a line outward. What happens if we follow this line?
In the case of my first experience on the bus - it was a proposal to let myself touch the people next to me, and by touching them - to think about them - to begin a sort of investigation into their life. Each time I initiated this contact a new line was thrown out - one that lead me along it into the person next to me.
Now - why do I act in this banal, quotidian territory? It's funny - I don't think of myself as an artist who deals with the banal. I generally think as being pretty (maybe dangerously) on the edge of a fantasy world. But I guess you are right - riding a bus, these everyday movements through day-to-day life, hold a real draw for me. I think part of it is that these moments - in their smallness - in their everydayness - feel like the starting block. They are the fabric of how we think, move through our lives, interact, etc. But within them there is a place for that real high drama - drawing the "moment-ness" in them out - finding their proposals. For me I think there is a creative tension between the two- that the banal is really a source for intensity.

PR: Thanks for your thoughts, I really liked this idea you had of a moment beinga loaded proposal, and that in order to see this proposal, one must 'forget' so to speak, one's expectations of events. It seems like for the moment to emerge for you, it must deviate from the 'script' of what I would call everyday Choreography. Could you talk a bitmore about this, perhaps regarding your Deep Acting Plays...

KC: Interesting question . . . I guess for me it does deviate from everyday choreography. Or it is totally embedded within it. I can’t decide. Maybe it deviates from it in that it pulls outside of it just a bit and by doing so can re-enter that choreography from a different angle. But these moments are still very much dependent on this everydayness – it is their fabric.
The deep acting plays relate to this. When I came up with these I was reading the sociologist, Arlie Hochschild’s work. She talks about emotional labor and how we are involved with this process – creating or managing feelings – on an everyday basis. I wanted to draw on this process and redirect it – taking it from something we do as form of normalization to better fit in - to something we might use as a tool that expand on how we interact with a situation. I was also thinking of Artaud and his “theatre of the everyday” and the idea that this theatre – these performances might exist not only in the everyday realm – but also might happen just inside our selves. That we could create these miniature plays for ourselves – as a way to push our emotions into an entirely new territory.
(I am still thinking through this idea of a moment containing a proposal – it wasn’t something I had thought about before writing to you – but maybe this proposal also has as its end a collapse of territories? The existing everyday world – and the new landscape where your thoughts have taken you)

One of the first deep acting plays were about landscapes – trying to imagine one while I was in the other or trying to collapse two together.