A Threshold Continuum
Performance with heirloom accordion, Grandparents’ chair, photographs of ancestors, steel apparatus, Red Ball Jets sneakers, coveralls.
This performance and related sculpture reuse and remix elements of the artist’s ancestral narrative. His great grandparents were among the many Belgian immigrants who arrived in this area in the early 20th century in search of industrial jobs. His great grandfather worked at the Ball Band Rubber Company in Mishawaka, and later his grandfather worked at the Bendix manufacturing plant in South Bend. The steel and machined elements point to that history of manufacturing, as do the shoes–Red Ball Jets were originally made at Ball Band. The accordion was brought from Belgium by an ancestor and played by the artist’s great grandfather, then his grandfather, and eventually his father. In the performance, Hutsebout dons the shoes and coveralls and sits with the accordion in his lap. For an undetermined period, he expands and compresses the bellows in alignment with his own breath. Through this paired breathing, the performance poses the persistence of historical artifacts against the transience and instability of the body and of memory. Hutsebout writes:
The breath I took is now in the past and can only be recalled from my memory. What did it feel like as my ribs expanded and my posture straightened? That singular breath only exists in my memory, and now that memory is shared with you. Will the memory of that breath be forgotten, or will it be preserved because you’re reading about it, continuously creating new memory?