A voice from Northern Ireland. A journey to Belfast. A particular tone, soft and violent, troubling. André Stitt speaks about his creative activity, his native Ireland with passion. It is a family table blackened by unbearable events. They are personal, particular, strong memories.
He writes, paints, draws and produces music. An artist.
The child of the street that he was tells his experiments, his trauma, without losing his breath, all that crossed his life of young man now grown to full stature. What he lived in Belfast, he carries it everywhere, in London, in New York, in the world. When he stages his own life he raises questions, questions itself, questions our capacity to grasp events, analyse and try to understand them. The present faces the past. The artist is still entangled in delusion.
Interpretations of Trauma. One feels unease, out of his zone of control, sometimes taken of nausea but also of empathy when looking at certain images: Saintfield, a market of Belfast, vegetables, odours of urines, drinking, pubs. Personal records: Auntie Alice and Uncle Ted.
He says himself saved by his studies at Art school of Belfast, the influence of Beuys. The voice becomes softer when He begins to talk about amnesia. He cannot remember what occurred between 1983 and 1992, he cannot put words on them. Gone. There is no representation of the Trauma. It consists of association and evocation rather than representation. Investigating another level through Trauma, domestic violence, alcohol, drugs. The images ravel, without noise, they are violent, disturbing, disrupting.
When he tells his performances as an artist in Sheffield or elsewhere, his voice sticks to images of debauchery, the music is puzzling. But amnesia is there. Some images on the newspapers are strange for him, unknown. He discovers them. Performance Art drives him in very dark hole, like a think possessed. The body setting in abyss, it is like a diving in the still open wounds of the communal memories, the demon within. debauchery, uncontrolled drinking, sprinkling food. Opposition to modern consumerism. Exorcism, demon drink ghost, recovery.
Contemporary experiments of conflict. His work is much to do with what to be transformed and not the conflict itself. His art reflects to others personal experiments. Disorder in North Ireland made him what He is now. Telling his stories, his city, he memorialises the time he lived in Belfast (Catholic Culture, Public humiliation, conflict transformation). Archives.
The change is change, it is not accommodation.
A parallel in the suffering, the political struggle: the image of two black athletes raising the fist in Mexico City in 1968. Political conscience (Political Awakening).
Present tense. He speaks of Dilemma as a guiding delusion of our time.
Life, Art, life as a natural consciousness. Every action as a performance of consciousness (Family and communal Trauma). Performing as a healing process. He projects and looks at them with delusion by investigating another level through Trauma, domestic violence, alcohol, drugs, political conflicts. He stages himself, He questions himself, his voice fades into deep softness. He says he has stopped drinking, He feels alleviated by putting his own experiments and seeing what and where the substance is, what the material of art is and trying to set a critical distance about his own emotions. Art as a work of attention of details. Today he has cured this deep suffering in alcohol used as a fuel, drugs and familial violence. Trauma. He has stopped drinking. But Belfast is in him forever. He measures the present in the past.
Now that the phantoms of the past disappear little by little, it is the time of contemplation, of silence. The time of recovery, of beauty and human celebration eventhough making Art has never shown him what is mean.
One cannot leave Stitt’s clinical experiments undisturbed. There is a palpable emotion in the room, a deep silence but much respect for his sincerity, honesty and his recovery. Minutes after his reading, I wanted to advance towards this man who faces his own demons with courage, to shake his hand and tell him my empathy, embrace him with my heart. I did not dare. I am still looking at this child on his street in Belfast, and his voice is stuck to me as a gentleness of ages. I look at him as a member of my family recovered after a long voyage in the abyss.
I saw you in the street when I was born.
B.
