Sasha Honigman is a multi-disciplinary artist from Northern California, based in Prague. Her artistic practice is based in material/sensory “play” and catalyzing shared experiences. Her work with performance comes in many flavors, from spiritually reflective collective rituals to absurd and humorous interventions in public space. Beneath all of her work is an interest in creating opportunity for connection and energetic collaboration.
An action honoring our private relationships with public spaces
An experiment in public displays of ephemeral markings
A happening mostly attended by children and dogs
When we interact, mark, or un/consciously connect with a communally accessible environment, could we consider it a private temporary territory?
Places become marked, energetically and physically. The seat in the tram adorned with a paint-pen tag, or the tree carved with initials, or your favorite park bench that you return to again and again– these locations have been claimed, but remain communal, layered with memory both perceivable and hidden, collages of information and landscapes of evolving relationships. How do we communicate with our surroundings, what do they communicate back to us, and what messages do we leave and receive from others in the context of shared space?
ON THE ACTION
Here in this unassuming park in Prague 5 I spent 25 minutes organizing leaves into six circular piles with my feet– a purposefully futile act of defining personal territory beneath a tree in the midst of its cyclical autumn shedding.
This action was pt.2 of a spontaneous action I initiated a week earlier in the driveway of a warehouse area in the outskirts of Prague 6, where a friend has his atelier. After some work inside, we came out for a break and a chat and a smoke. As we spoke, I began carefully kicking the leaves into clean circular piles, a mindless movement. Soon he joined me in the act and then the act became a impromptu ordering of the chaos on the cement, until a truck pulled in and drove right through it and thus, our unchoreographed dance with the detritus dwindled as the “territory” was now no longer just ours and our forms were returned to their original disarray.
This catalyzed a reflection on two topics: our tendency to create temporary territories in public spaces and our relationship with the marks we make as they become a part of the public landscape. This reflection will continue in future actions and experiments in varying environments and seasons.
