Individual subjects usually refer to me as a collective. Or as: organisation, group of friends, even group of groups. (In the worst case people call me stichting or production house - although I much prefer that to being called ‘football club’, for instance.-

I feel really at stake when I am ‘a movement’.

Conventional signs of my identity are rather difficult to pinpoint and understand. I am not exactly sure about my gender (although my name and also the biggest part of me is female, something like 83,3 %). I have seven different passports and five different nationalities… they are all legal! I reside in at least four cities at the same time, except about four times a year, when I manage to concentrate myself in one place, in order not to become completely disconnected and permanently schizoid. Nevertheless I am not fictional. I am real. (I have 2785 friends in My Space.) I have a bank account, even an office. I have birthday parties, an address book and I even sometimes make dinners for my friends… The good thing is that I pay taxes only in one country. When I do that I am not called by the simple name LISA, but I get an additional title: Association LISA! In fact, almost every time I appear in public I am addressed by that title. It sounds almost like ‘baroness LISA’ or ‘professor LISA’. When I meet people I don’t immediately tell them that I am an association. More often than not they find out very quickly and then they start speaking to me in a slightly different way.
In fact, only an intimate circle of friends calls me LISA.
I am a collective subject, so usually I do not talk myself - I rather give room and space for other people’s voices… And there are so many of these voices that I often do not manage to cover all the points on the agenda. Although I have no voice myself, at least not an individual one, I have given myself the freedom to communicate my-self this time. Ironic that I say ‘my-self’… ‘my own self’… I cannot say that I own myself – it is the others that own me: my friends, my allies, my enemies and their singular relationships to each other and the world. However, as a collective subject, I still think of myself as singular. You know - I have my tendencies, my obsessions and my fascinations, too…

Collective: a group of people that have common interests and are working together to achieve them. Why would I use the word collective? ‘Collective’ is such a strange word, almost not usable as a noun anymore, as it seems to display a certain nostalgia about past times. And when it is defined as abstractly as above we could also be passengers on the Thalys to Paris – but are they all working together? Is travelling working? For me the only interesting thing about the word collective is that it entails something shared, whatever that might be.

There is an interesting French expression that I could apply here. ‘Nous’ is ‘we’; ok, that’s understood. But if we look it up in the Collins online dictionary, ‘nous autres’ also stands for ‘we’. Literally you would translate ‘nous autres’ as ‘we others’ or ‘we (the) others’. ‘We’ would then represent two different ideas depending on the point of view. It either includes or rejects the ‘others’. But then again, every inclusion is a rejection and every rejection is an inclusion. Conclusion: this doesn’t bring us very far… Still… I like the expression ‘nous autres’ (nosotros in Spanish) very much. Exactly for its ambivalence.
Oops! I introduced the notion of ‘I’ in this text.
Will that be accepted by the ‘we’?
Will the ‘we’ call me ‘autre’?
You. [And introduced the you!]
Me.
We.
That’s what the other one would say.
I, LISA,
the others and Me.
I like to look at myself as being part of a larger surrounding. I feel that I am getting too old for a solely introspective gaze. My collective members are not only mine, they also continue to live outside of me, team up with other people, deal with rules and regulations which are not drafted by them. Do I stop being when they are not there? No. I might be not concretely present, but I remain and linger – in the hearts and minds of my members and their allies (and maybe in other dark corners that I do not know of).
So I am one – but also many at the same time. I am pretty amorphous. I am here, sometimes, almost visible, but not. I remain in-between those that know me. I have a name, but I am idea, sometimes I call myself a phantom. I can inhabit people. So sometimes, for a very short time, I get a very strong feeling that I do have a solid identity – at other times, I am something like a porous, filtering, feeding-back field of resonance, a force and an invisible connection (ffffff- I think I like alliterations…). I have a tendency, though, to stay in the shades, to slip through fingers like quicksilver when someone tries to catch me. I am not easy. This sometimes gives me headaches.

I was conceived in the heads of my members in April 2003, and grew in there invisibly until I was born in October 2003, during a delicious dinner somewhere in Amsterdam. I was born out of five people coming together. When I was born they preferred to see me as their sixth friend. They also wanted me to be blond and beautiful, thin and silent, smoothly sneaking into the night. They saw me climbing walls, jumping roofs, wresting bricks. They wanted me to climb through small bathroom windows, to hide in cellars, to laugh contagiously and to talk with a dark voice. They wanted me to invent different routes, to draw new maps, to open hidden doors, to slip between the lines. Grasp your hand, hold you close, throw you off, beat you down, pull you up. (To kick arses, look in mirrors, be invisible, change appearance, make new friends…). They wanted me to be four letters tall. L-I-S-A.

My members were then and are still independent artists. They do not share a fascination for each other’s works specifically… Or maybe the fact that they did share a fascination for each other’s working and thinking created me… However, that fascination never resulted in a complete identification with each other’s universes. Nor did it result in a common manifesto or declaration of any sort. There is continuous differences, friction and oppositions in my member’s being and acting in the world. (Imagine the effect this has on my walking pattern!).

Although they came together as befriended colleagues, it’s a peculiar friendship they now exercise: They are attempting to replace the concentration on an ideological affiliation (that too much ‘love for each other will tear them apart’) with an intention to create different methodologies and forms of organisation, participation and exchange, so as to cultivate new attitudes and practices of thinking and being together, these shaping a different relation to the world and its always hidden (or repressed, undervalued, underestimated, unspecialised) possibilities.

Together with the individual subjects connected to me, I share the inclination to be moved by error and fragility. However, I am not moved by fragility for its own sake. I need co-presence, addition, and exchange. I myself am incomplete, I cannot exist on my own, I need complements. I never actually manage to be completed, because before I do, I become something else as I transform with the conditions of my current existence: circumstances, events, desires are disrupting and at the same time complementing my very nature. My nature: which is nothing but a moment, an experienced moment through-by-towards-with others. I do not perceive myself as a large organ. My nature is invisible and in fact of no nature at all. My sensibility is ecology without nature yet an ecology (or pseudo-ecology) in constant metamorphosis provoking chemical reactions needed for my body to function: questions, conflictive, antagonistic positions, ideas and actions operate without a specific ideology, nor a fixed point of reference.

I have no nature of my own and, as a collective subject; I am neither pure nor perfect… far from that. I am always contaminated. The symptoms manifested in this contamination shape the way I feel, live, think and speak, as well as all the organisational aspects of my bodywork. They become a tool to rearrange those symptoms in the present and in thought, in order to intervene in the world and in the artistic practice of my members. At the same time, my members use that knowledge in order to produce nervous impulses and potentialities in action.

I sometimes feel I am too mysterious, almost on the verge of being too poetic in my ways to explain myself. I rather like it that I LIVE although without a real body, that I have good memories of the Old Days, that I have quarrels and make it up again, that I have a logo and a website, that I meet & exchange and that I have dreams for the future. On the other hand, I wonder where this nostalgia comes from? I once promised to myself that I would not want to go nostalgic neither revolutionary. There are plenty of things to do, plenty of things to dream. This is something my members struggle with: how much effort and willpower to invest in an uncertain project like a collective-subject?

I have a quiet temperament, yet I am committed. Often the members of the collective meet and agree to modify themselves, to avoid any centralisation of tasks and engagements among them, for instance – I am a flexible subject. How could it be otherwise, if my non-nature is the only one capable of de-materialising and re-materialising without having death as a mediator? For instance: where am I, when I am not at dinners, conferences, performances, or (pseudo-) experiments that should rather be called ‘festivals’ (at Theater Kikker, for instance)? Am I in the office? In our funds? On the web page? I am and I am not. All of these circumstances are of a different kind. They are not I. They are not a collective (nor a group of friends, nor a movement). A collective can always be dematerialised; and it exists only in its promise to materialise again. I live on the promise that I will materialise again. Indeed, my plan of life is no doubt uncertain… definitely inefficient and… not very loyal. I have seen how my members work at the edge of deception. They are often in crisis. Almost like lovers (hopefully not always). It is precisely the state of crisis, of disease and its symptoms, that keeps their activity alert and caring. Nevertheless they are rather passionate lovers, they expose and diffuse; they are critically bound to each other.

I wonder: What do I look like?

The strange thing is that I have never seen myself. I know myself only from the inside. I can feel my blood rushing when I am angry, my heart getting bigger when I am full of hope, my stomach bubbling when I am excited. I can also analyse myself relatively well.

I constantly feel a bit schizophrenic. There are six voices speaking in me and I spend most of my time negotiating ‘myself’ through those voices. (And these last lines have been written by only one of the six voices of LISA, taking possession of ‘her’ momentarily).

When I try to imagine myself, I see myself sitting. There is always a table with a lot of computers: I have six laptops, all of which are Macs. In each of those computers there is at least one folder called LISA. Some of the documents in those six different folders are almost identical, nevertheless they often have different names, or they are written in different font. I am a shape-shifter…
It is funny to be somebody, but not to have a body that can be photographed or looked at in a mirror. I am not blind. It is just that my body isn’t visible…. Or maybe even not a real body, in the strict sense of the word. It does not have a clothes-size, it does not have an eye colour, it does not have hair … It is even missing legs and arms.
I guess my body exists only in its traces… Traces that I left in places that I passed by, with people that I exchanged emails with, in the things I have said and done, in the gossip that is circulating about me.
As a matter of fact, this very text is also part of my body. So, once again: My body is so flexible, it is able to stretch itself into all kinds of shapes. This makes me think that physically speaking I am rather monstrous!
When I dance I feel a bit clumsy, because my body wants to change directions all the time. My sense of rhythm is quite peculiar. So more often than not I imagine myself dancing and I do not really go to dance. Or I dance with partners that can help guiding me.
But I need to move in order to feel my body.
And I’d like to move you,
LISA