Битеф

jyfe / Foto: Laurent Phillipe. I

LAST LANDSCAPE Josef Nadj defines the project Last Landscape as "a self portrait facing a landscape". But the landscape under consideration here is neither an abstraction nor a generality. It is an existing landscape a few kilometres from his small hometown, Kanjiza, in Serbia's Province ofVojvodina. A landscape-only kilometres from the border with Hungary on the North and Romania on the East - that has enthralled him since childhood. The Landscape Referred to as "the desert", this landscape with its peculiar characteristics is lost in the middle of Pannonia - a vast plain that was once a sea, of which Lake Balaton might be the liquid "imprint". Hardly a tree on the horizon, but an expanse of wild grass gripping the clayey low lands, absolutely arid, where nevertheless a sleeping spring emerges from time to time. In manifold legends it is said this spring has miraculous virtues. Near by is a small structure from which, by a system of canalization, the spring water once flowed towards Kanjiza. But also enshrouded by the grass are burial mounds, whose existence credits the idea that thousands of years ago this "desert"and its magical spring was a religious site for nomadic tribes. The region's climate is continental, marked by diluvial rains and intensive heat or cold; the landscape varies in function of the seasons and climatic conditions - eitherthe rainwater is retained at the deepest part of the depression, forming a shallow pond, totally opaque, grey-green and clayey, or under the effect of the heat and frost, the clay dries out and cracks cross its surface. Self Portrait In the course of recent years, Josef Nadj's stage creations can be divided into two distinct axes: on one hand, group pieces inspired by the life and work of an artist (with one exception, all are writers) and on the other hand, small forms (solos and duets) that pick up the thread of Nadj's earliest choreographies in which the place of autobiography and personal experience is more exposed, more visible. Last Landscape belongs to the second category. A self-portrait, voluntarily incomplete, in the manner of those tableaux or literary (self-)fictions that portray the painter in his studio or the writer facing the empty page... All in all it's a self-portrait of the artist at work, where the "work in progress" is moreover considered as a return to the sources of his art. In this way Josef Nadj conceives Last Landscape as a sort of break, both reflexive and fertile. An exploration concerning the origin of movement, and more precisely, concerning the origin of his movement. Because for Nadj the question of origins (both in the larger sense and in the sense of his own personal origins) is a central preoccupation. Process The starting point for Last Landscape is the concept of landscape, the idea of this specific landscape, like a "primitive scene" - in other words, as a site where movement is rooted. This deserted site, as metaphor for the most extreme sober and stark paring down to essentials, becomes the site for exploration beyond all artifice, all conceptualization, all intellectual elaboration. In this direct and concrete relationship between man and the world - in this case Josef Nadj and the landscape of his childhood - this primary and "ultimate" landscape, representing for him the synthesis, an ideal in any creation, between "material and concept". To begin with, this exploration develops from sensation, the perception of this specific fragment of nature - a question of"immersing''oneself in the landscape, allowing oneself to be absorbed by it in an attempt to understand, understand its story and its repercussions, the present and its most minute variations. Then follows the immediate translation of this sensation into movement that is the echo, the extension and something of the emanation of the landscape itself. The next step consists of memorizing this "original movement", interiorizing it to be able to carry it with oneself in order to be able to realize and renew it outside of the landscape - in the studio or on stage. Or