Introducing enne&moffa

I know this may sound ridiculous, after so long and it is not even the person you know best who will be writing this post. Do not threat, the lovely Enne has something up her sleeve that will quite amaze you pretty soon! But for now, hello, my stranger friends! Although you may not know me through writing, I am the other half of Tape Modern the Moffa in enne&moffa.
Throughout these months of virtual inactivity on the media platforms of Tape Modern, we have been actually very busy with our dyad enne&moffa, who have been off gallivanting with various projects that have taken us as far as Asia and to the very convoluted and alienating world of social media chats. The two worlds that we recently had the privilege of being part of are a beautiful juxtaposition to each other; first we had the pettiness of a first world lifestyle, where people get in a fuss over ‘#firstworldproblems’ and the other, our trip to Bangladesh that put the realities of life’s struggles into perspective.
Late last year we started working on making happenings within Manchester. Happenings come from the ordinary, modified to reveal the absurdity of everyday life and placed back within an ordinary setting. The term was first created by the great Allan Kaprow in the 1960s, meaning something slightly different, but the concept feels just as relevant today so we created our own spin of it to appreciate the tradition. In a sense, we are reusing this form of art-making as a means to ask questions both from our performance practice and from the audience that has no restrictions on the context in which they see these happenings on the streets during their daily life routines. Happenings are also a form of experimentation and an active “sketchbook” for our performance practice and I believe they are born through the necessities of young energetic artists and from the more obscure and illogical parts of our brain.

‘the cashier only allowed us 24 jars’ (Two bodies covered in jam, a camper battery, a power inverter, toaster and toast. 11 am busy street) was the happening that spurred the most interest from people and the media. I don’t want to sound naive or stereotypical, but it seems that in our artistic mindset of creation, we seem to often end up in some kind of enne&moffa bubble that seems to perceive the world quite differently to the rest of the world. This includes not necessarily realising how big an effect this happening might have. Neither one of us is big on social media but now we really got inducted on how quickly news can spread. The variety of people’s comments ranged from extremely funny, witty, interesting and insightful to critical, abusing and intolerant. Experiencing a social media audience and the police was a fascinating new way in which our work was viewed. Within the online comments, there were many puns and innuendos about jam tarts, but by far the funniest was the ‘don’t waste food’ -criticisers while we were sitting right in front of a multinational supermarket store. Other comments were instead, thought-provoking, such as comments on our gender, pointing out that if we had been males the reaction and the underlying meanings of the happening would be very different. ‘the cashier only allowed us 24 jars’ achieved exactly what we were hoping for with the happenings and more. We were allowed into thousands of viewers opinions on an action that could or could not be considered art depending on who you asked. Many of the more offensive comments were deleted by what I assume are Facebook filters, the news articles are out there in the virtual space with the remaining comments if you wish to read them. An impressive thing about this happening was perhaps the level of shock that people expressed online compared to the audience who was actually present on Market Street, they were happily interacting with us and filming us. This community is so normalised to the atrocities that are happening all over the world to people, children and the planet, yet a little nudity takes what happened on a sunny day in autumn on Market St. up to the 8th most read article on the BBC. I can only imagine this is because it is in reach to have a say about what happened on Market St. whilst most news and politics is quite alienating.
Between this time and heading to Bangladesh we had a lot of interest from different media organisations, a few interviews, a contact from a reality TV show and a lovely exhibition in Manchester that deserves a mention for I believe the performance we did was one of our best; ‘power’ and I’ll explain why later on.

Our trip to Bangladesh sprouted from my deep-rooted love for Asia, I have worked in a few countries in South East Asia and thought it was time to explore South Asia, this time bringing my other artist half with me. We were accepted into the Dhaka Live Art Biennale and the Chittagong Open Art Biennale in February with a work called ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that contemplated various aspects of waiting and the 21 st century culture of waiting. There we also worked with an LGBTQ+ film production group ‘Epiphania’ which invited us to do a work for a private event in the Goethe Institute in support and education of the LGBTQ+ community of Bangladesh for a small selected group of more open-minded people. For them, we performed ‘tähteinvälinen’ (don’t worry I hardly can say the title either).

I won’t go too much into the works we performed there, as you may know, we don’t believe in our works being explained but rather be the means for thinking, questioning and conversations. Working in Bangladesh was a great eye-opener, not only in terms of life conditions and attitudes but also on an artistic level, being there gave us the ability to almost put our works on a measuring scale of powerfulness, and by power, I intend more an emotional, empathetic and universal language power. I am not going to distinguish myself from the complainers and the pettiness of some aspects of the western culture, I am right in there with most of you. But working there, while it was maybe not the most successfully organised biennale that we could have hoped for, it made me realise that working within these kinds of countries forces your work to speak of a much deeper human condition than previously, because there, your work is trying to reach people who have the basic priorities of life to concentrate on firstly, a struggle that has less space to indulge egotistic visual nonsense. If your work can speak there, you have achieved a little more balance on that measuring scale. I mentioned earlier that before leaving, enne&moffa did a work called ‘power’, this was a deeply personal work but as we later found out, it was deeply personal to most. The work considered laughter, the darker, depersonalising and instrumental laughter that comes from a form of defence mechanisms. Many of our works were ostracised straight out, due to the nudity factor, by many people in Bangladesh. Both for cultural reasons and for the true fact that they do not see nudity with the frequency the west does, however ‘power’ received an amazing amount of consideration and conversation openers from the most unusual people, woman and men. This led me to believe that on this imaginary weighing machine, one of our works had managed to definitely pull up the heavy weight of the other side, representing the sensitivities of all, independently from their geographical position.

Now we are finally both back in the UK, I say finally because I took a long detour instead of returning with Enne after the biennales. We are now boosted for energy, experience and widened our perspectives of the realities in which the world is floating in. On a human level, I think what was striking about this trip, seen from an outsiders perspective of course, was the different philosophy of life there. There seemed to be more love, more happiness and more smiles shared in a community that has much greater differences and not even comparable sized problems and restrictions to ours. They are looking at the west as an ‘ideological’ capitalist utopia, although we perhaps have more to learn from them seeing the division that is sprouting within the western countries in the last years and hopefully they will find a more sustainable way to achieve the comforts we take for granted here.
Coming soon: As I mentioned, Enne has something quite exciting up her sleeve, that I believe will be shared with you fairly soon. In the meantime, together with Scaffold Gallery, Tape Modern has organised a public performance event in Manchester on the 11th of July, Allure of Sorts. You can find more info on this on the Facebook event page here and you are very welcome to join us for a day of performance art!