Today I woke up early and discovered there was a stone in my heart. Not big, not small, but it was definitely a heavy burden. It became difficult to breath. I didn’t know who had put it there, now it was there, it didn’t want to leave. It was a new experience. Once I broke my heart and I heard it cracking. After this, i always said to comfort myself, a broken heart is an open heart. But this was different. Now, there was just a stone, right in my heart.I put my hand on my chest, to get in contact with the stone. Nothing happened.  A stone is a stone is a stone, right in my heart. I thought about the obvious things that block me at this moment. But these thoughts didn’t influence the stone at all. I thought about the fact that stones are old and carry a certain wisdom. My hand started to feel quite comfortable on my chest. My hand likes to hold stones in its palm and also it likes to touch bodies. So it had a very good time suddenly with my heart and the stone under its reach.

Coming back from my one week holiday it seems that I restart the work with different eyes. I found a new energy with which I look differently to the things i make.

Visiting the Biennale in Venice during my holiday I discovered that I still can admire some artists deeply, but that they have no influence on me anymore. The older I get, the more I am convinced that I must follow my own way, wherever it will lead to.

I still can’t find a balance between two extreme art approaches. At one side I engage with politically engaged community based art and at the other side i feel attracted to hermetic mystic often hyper personal work. At the Biennale Jeremy Deller translated his anger about the still existing class struggle in England in a sparkling contemporary dramaturgy of direct imagery and historical reflections. It was mind blowing in its working for a clear community and made me rethink again and again the position of art towards the power-structures in our capitalist society.

However my own investigation in political  issues focuses on the question why the human mind learns to think in a separation between us and the others and how we get used to think in power-games to survive these separations. As i wrote already so many times now, my main political subject is how a patriarchal society influences our way of perceiving and creating realities.

At the other side, I was also deeply touched by the loneliness of an artist who makes work only to be able to survive the world. I  admire the autistic universe of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, the Brazilian Joseph Beuys, who embroidered autodidactic prayers on the sheets of the mental hospital where he stayed as a patient for most of his life. How isolated must an artist operate to create such an alternative way of perceiving the world we live in.

Lately friends start to say that I become more and more a character out of my own work. I think they refer to the fact that I let my beard and hair grow for the performance as a faun and a nymph. They see me as a man who visually becomes wilder and wilder. But how much does this influence me as a private person.

The older I get, the more seriously I use my own mind and body and the words gentleness and grace to create. The borders between art and my life become blurry. But i fear no mental hospital as long as i believe that humping around as a faun in the forest brings a healing quality to me as a performer, director, artist and person.

So, let the faun take over.