It seems the hardest thing is realizing you are in charge

Catarina de Oliveira and Camilla Wills will stage an open rehearsal of 2 performances made in conversation at Watermill. One at dusk, and the other in the darkness that follows. The artists reject the generally accepted system of ‘time’, instead believing each individual invents a personal and distinctive rhythm. Embracing their own relation to time, duration and history, they lift fragments from a diverse range of sources including Christopher Isherwood, epileptic characters, Suely Rolnik, and a grandmother, out of the frozen realm of reference and allow them the opportunity to work in a subtle, performative way. Implicit to the work is a negotiation of The Watermill Center itself, a dramatically staged live/work space literally overseen by Robert Wilson’s collection of artifacts, where domestic disorder and chaos are hidden out of sight.

Catarina de Oliveira’s practice incorporates: theatre plays; dance pieces; videos and audio plays, often being a tangent to these different mediums. Through the use of stylized imagery, restrained formal compositions and fragmented narratives, her artworks seek to investigate how different power structures operate and their manifestations through social and political rituals, along with inquiring how certain narratives or myths became part of a community’s history. She has been addressing such issues mostly by rendering the directorial input visible and by creating narratives that while existing in the symbolic and allegorical realms, escape dialectical or linear forms of engaging with time and history. Catarina is a Portuguese artist born in 1984 currently taking a Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. She was recently awarded the Huygens Scholarship by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and was selected by Serralves Foundation for the BESrevelação 2011 production grant and exhibition.

Understanding the grammar and layout of literature as an emotional field, Camilla Wills uses her preoccupation with the irrepressible affectivity of literary language to produce performances, installation, video and written work. The work posits the sensory properties of a phenomenological body perceiving the material world coupled with an errant, energetic subjectivity. A loose cadence of ideas materializes, and these associative patterns and chains of metaphors are embraced on the premise that they render experience legible, that recognizability converts into cognition. Camilla is a British artist born in 1985. She completed the Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute in 2011, which concluded with an exhibition and catalogue in collaboration with the curator Ellen Blumenstein. She co-edits Dauerwelle, a journal for artists’ writing, found texts and extended editorial with Jacob Blandy.