“I think the public is tired. They are tired of listening to the same operas and seeing the same shows, over and over. They want something new. Something that is present, something that is alive, something that talks about the problems that we have in the world today. The world is changing, and art is supposed to change too.” Aleksandar Timotic is tired too, of being categorised, put in a box, and told to stay in his lane.
A classically trained opera singer, Timotic has sat at the feet of long durational performance art legend Marina Ambramovic and come away with a renewed sense of how he can use his voice as part of a wider practice, that can reach out more directly to the public. We saw the beginnings of this practice blossom when he presented his first piece of interactive long durational art, Are You Hungry? , an emotionally charged piece that invites the audience to peel potatoes together, as part of the Abramovic Institute takeover of the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.
Timoitic joins us in the voidspace to talk about his work with Abramaovic, the background and reactions to Are You Hungry? and his hopes for an arts world without boundaries.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace. Welcome and thank you. To start off, I just like to ask you a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Aleksandar Timotic:
I first trained as an opera singer, and I’ve been doing that for around ten years. I usually work in classical opera theatre, in particular in baroque music, because of specifics of my voice. I’m counter tenor, and we don’t have a big repertoire. It’s usually very baroque, very old, very little of anything else. Two years ago, I met Marina Abramovic, during my master’s studies at Folkwang University of the Arts in Germany, where Marina had a professorship last year.
I was Marina’s student for one year. She picked up 20 students from all over the university, from totally different disciplines. There were actors, physical theatre practitioners, a violinist, a saxophonist, jazz singers, and I was one of the opera singers. We were all from totally different disciplines, and we were all studying with Marina. When I applied to study with Marina, I didn’t really have any idea about performance art. Rather, I knew about performance art, but I never saw myself in that world, although I felt a little bit suffocated in the classical theatre: I couldn’t express myself totally.
I didn’t know if Marina would accept me or not, but I wanted to meet her and learn something from her, because I found her fascinating, as a person and as an artist, and i thought that this time with her would be good for my art as well. When we started the process of studying and teaching, I definitely found that to be the case. The result of my studies with Marina was Are You Hungry?, the piece that I performed at the South Bank Centre in October 2023.
voidspace:
How did Marina select who she would tutor, from such a wide range of disciplines?
Aleksandar Timotic:
First we had to apply through email, so we sent our videos, showing what we do, what our art is. We wrote a letter setting out why we want to study with her. From, I think it was around 700 applicants, she picked around 20 of us.
voidspace:
What was studying with her like? How did she approach it, given that you all come from such different backgrounds?
Aleksandar Timotic:
That was very interesting. I think she tried to make sure that we would keep to the medium that we already worked in but take it somewhere new. For example, I used my voice in my piece, but Marina encouraged me to do something that nobody would expect. An opera singer, peeling potatoes, or a dancer planting flowers. She motivated us all to come out of our comfort zones and to try something new, not to be afraid to take a risk. It was something that brought us to a totally new level as artists.
voidspace:
Your studies led to the creation of Are You Hungry? which you exhibited at the South bank centre in October 2023 as part of the Marina Abramovic Institute takeover. Can you tell us a little bit about this work?
Aleksandar Timotic:
My work is curated by Marina and Billy Zhao, her assistant. The pieces that we made with Marina were supposed to be something that was very familiar to us. So I found inspiration in the Balkan culture, where I come from. That is my background, and of course music that is very close to me. Behind the name of the piece, Are You Hungry?, is the phrase that we usually use in the Balkans when we want to tell someone that we love them. We never say: “I love you, I care about you.” Never very openly. Instead, we’ll ask: “Do you want to eat something? Are you hungry?”
voidspace:
Can you describe the piece for me? Set the scene.
Aleksandar Timotic:
This piece is very simple. We have a big table with twelve chairs around it. I’m there all the time, and we are all sitting together, peeling potatoes. In the Southbank Centre we had two tonnes of potatoes behind us.
voidspace:
That massive pile of potatoes made it all feel larger than life, because it takes you into territory that is a bit more symbolic. Did you mean for us to get that sense from it?
Aleksandar Timotic:
I did, definitely. That was my idea. I first did the piece, in Germany, we used to bring potatoes every day and put them on the table. In London I thought we should put all of the potatoes behind us, so that we can work through them over the five days of the exhibition.
Having the potatoes there meant that everyone was free to join the piece and get this experience by themselves, to touch the soil, to take a potato in their hands, to peel it, and to be the part of the community that we’re building at this table. And in this moment, I stand up and start singing. I would sing all the songs that I grew up with, folk songs from the Balkans, that are very tragic, very emotional. They’re very dramatic, very deep emotionally. In the Balkans you will never hear people talking like this about their emotional life. They will never say these sorts of things to each other, but they express their feelings through their songs. In Are You Hungry? I put all these things together.
voidspace:
Unspoken expression of love through food, and then also the other outlet that you have for expressing high emotion, which is this very heightened emotional song.
Aleksandar Timotic:
Absolutely. My idea was to show all these emotions, and make this community. Because I think this is exactly what people missing today. They’re missing community. They’re missing this togetherness, being part of something. They don’t see each other anymore. We don’t have the safety of community, which is something we need. Families have changed a lot over the past 50 or 60 years.
voidspace:
People talk about the death of the village, don’t they?
Aleksandar Timotic:
Absolutely. Even I get nostalgic for it. Every time I get tired or burnt-out I say, “Oh! I’m just going to move back to a village, and buy a shop and make cheese!” This is our place of escape, when we’re getting sick from the city, from the noise, from trying to build something financially. This essential thing that we really need, to be in the touch with earth and with each other.
Are You Hungry? has many layers, so you can find different elements in it. What I love about the piece is that when I created it, I didn’t have all these thoughts in my head. I just unconsciously made it this way. Then after I performed it, I’d get messages on Instagram from people who’d been there, and they had observed totally different things. They’d tell me they had this or that experience, and they’d ask me: “Am I right? Did you really try to send this message?” And at this moment, I’d realise that I’d never thought about it, but when they said it, it absolutely made sense. I think this is what is beautiful about art, that maybe even artists don’t know everything about their own piece, and people who watch it, they can find something totally new. That kind of piece gets its own life. It grows up. It’s like a kid. You just let it grow up and show you what it is.
voidspace:
The sense of the connecton to the earth is something I picked up on. I remember, when I participated in the piece, the smell of those potato peelings. And then the music, even though I couldn’t understand the words, I could sense the emotion. I think it taps into something very elemental, maybe something that transcends language. I’d love to know a little bit more about how you found the audience responding.
Aleksandar Timotic:
I’ve performed the piece twice, in Germany and in England. I want to do my piece in different parts of Europe, in different parts of the world. I just want to see if people react the same way to the same piece, in different cultures.
voidspace:
Were there differences between the reactions you got in Germany and in England?
Aleksandar Timotic:
It’s hard to say. I think probably if I did my piece, let’s say, in Norwich or Ipswich, or another some smaller city in England, it would maybe be received totally differently than it was in London.
Phones, and the internet, and digitalization are an important part of our life today. Even for us as artists, if your work isn’t online, it’s like you never did it. You have the memory, which is wonderful, but at the same time, it’s very important that you have some documentation. But I had this feeling that because we were in London, people were automatically coming along with their phones, taking photos. They closed themselves off from the experience, because you can’t experience it if you are watching through the screen. I can’t say, though, that I’ve seen different reactions in different cultures. There are different mentalities, but when it comes to art, to emotion, I think people react in the same way.
voidspace:
Are You Hungry? hits on something universal, doesn’t it? Visual art, live art and even the element of song: these are all things that transcend language. So, you can communicate with people with whom you don’t necessarily share a spoken or written language.
Aleksandar Timotic:
Exactly. It happened to me. I remember there were one person who just came up to me, while I was peeling potatoes, and they said “Can I just kiss you? And then I’m going to leave.” Then they just give me a kiss, and laughed. It was sweet, it was nice but at the same time I thought that I could never have expected that to happen!
At other times, people started to sing their own songs, songs from their own childhood, in different languages. That was something new, that added to the performance. This happened in Germany, too. A friend of mine, who studied with me, she’s from Albania. I come from a Serbian background, and we know that Albania and Serbia do not have a very good relationship, politically. We’ve even been at war. And when my Albanian friend visited me, she just started singing in Albanian. She was singing in Albanian, and I was singing in Serbian, and we peeled potatoes together, at the same table.
This brought a whole new dimension to the piece. It was amazing, through art we could show that our two cultures can totally sit together, and make food, and live together and make a life at the same table.
Some incredible stuff happened. One woman had a baby, and she started breastfeeding, there at the table, while we were peeling potatoes. She was breastfeeding this kid, and at the same moment, one guy in a wheelchair was watching the piece from the sidelines. I called someone and asked them to make space to let him come here and start peeling potatoes with us. And there was a guy in a suit who had probably come from some office somewhere, and some young hipster. And I couldn’t help think: all these people here at this table, they will never sit together anywhere else, only in this museum. These different worlds never meet each other. They each live in their own kind of subculture. But here, in this place, we are all together, and we are part of one big family. This is the kind of thing that you can’t predict. You can’t know that this is going to happen, that you’re going to have this experience. You just come along with the idea, and it all starts to happen.
voidspace:
For me, that’s the beauty of interactive art. I love work where people can bring something of themselves to it.
The idea of long durational art is that you’re there for the long haul. You don’t just do a short performance, then stop. You’re there for the whole day, or for five days. How do you prepare for that kind of duration of work?
Aleksandar Timotic:
You have to prepare mentally – you know that you’re going to do something tough, and you have to prepare physically – you must get enough sleep and rest so you can be present in the moment – but you can’t really prepare. You can never be prepared for log durational performance, as it’s something that is totally unpredictable. You can practise, but I think it’s important to be open to every experience that is going to happen.
Marina’s Cleaning the House workshop was my preparation for long durational performance. It was amazing. It was something that you can experience once in a lifetime. Over six days, you don’t eat, you give up all your gadgets, even your watch. You enter a space where you don’t have any idea about the time, about the outside world. And you do different exercises.
On the first day, I remember we walked for I don’t know how many hours in the woods. Then we had to sit at a table and separate lentils from rice for 6 hours. Then we stood in front of the doors, and we just opened and closed them for 4 hours without stopping, without any break. It puts you in a real altered state of consciousness, because it’s that kind of almost meditative activity. It is in the moment. Marina likes to say that when you’re doing this, these doors became your universe, your everything. Just this slow moment. You find a totally new world, in doing this.
For me, personally, the hardest thing about the experience was that I didn’t have any contact, I didn’t have my phone, I didn’t have any control over anything. And that was kind of scary.
voidspace:
It’s interesting how used we are to that now, to having that anchor to the outside world, that information all the time. How dependent we’ve all become on that sense of being connected all the time, not wanting to miss out on anything.
Aleksandar Timotic:
I don’t see myself as very addicted to my phone, but when I didn’t have it durng those six days, at first I started to panic: I don’t have any control, I don’t know what is going on. Then after five or six days, you turn on your phone, and you realise nothing happened. You have a few messages, a few emails, but nobody looked for you. It’s a great experience.
When you’ve been through the experience of Cleaning the House, when you then do your performance, you’re realise that if you’ve been through that experience, you will definitely be capable of doing this. Five hours peeling potatoes is not, nothing, but this is Marina’s system to prepare you.
voidspace:
What are your plans for the future?
Aleksandar Timotic:
In February, in Germany, I’m doing re-performance of the opera performance that Kenning Christiansen, did in 1969. I didn’t know about this piece at all, but the director of the museum, saw me singing and peeling potatoes for Are You Hungry? and she was like, “Oh, my God! You’re a perfect person for this!” I didn’t know about this piece. So, it already exists, this potato opera, and I’m first person who will ever re-perform it.
The other thing I’m doing: Marina is making her new opera, and I’m part of it. We’ll start creating it this spring. In April, I’m coming back to classical opera theatre. I’m going to perform Shostakovich at the Munich Opera House. And in the summer, I’m going to fly to Asia and do my potato piece again.
voidspace:
Where would you like to see things heading in the arts world?
Aleksandar Timotic:
I would like to people not ask me if I’m an opera singer, or if I’m a performance artist now. I’d like people to be more open. I think it’s interesting how the public is more open than the artists. When I do my pieces, I see that people react beautifully. They react with their heart. They don’t ask these sorts of questions. This is totally right thing, not to ask questions, just to go and to get the experience. When you get the experience, you will find your own questions. I’m not the one who’s supposed to give you the questions. You’re supposed to find them, as an artist.
But artists are not always open. They need to put everything in box. If you are painter, you’re supposed to be a painter. If you’re a dancer, you’re supposed to be a dancer. If you’re singer, you’re supposed to be a singer. And art is much bigger than this. We have so many elements that we are allowed to play with. Nobody puts the borders around us. We are the only ones who do that. I am allowed to do whatever I want. I can use different mediums, to take my point or my idea and develop it.
I don’t like having to depend on some company or theatre and wait for someone to recognise me and give me a project, when I can do it by myself. I can develop something totally new that nobody ever did. I think the public is tired. They are tired of listening to the same operas and seeing the same shows, over and over. They want something new. Something that is present, something that is alive, something that talks about the problems that we have in the world today. The world is changing, and art is supposed to change too.
I love classical art. I’m classical art trained. This is where my knowledge is. I would never be what I am today if I hadn’t gone through it, but I’m also allowed to work outside of it.
Maybe nobody will care about what I’m doing now in 15 years. But at the same time, maybe someone will find some meaning in my piece about potatoes, and people, and connection, and the particular moment that we are in right now.
voidspace:
What advice do you have for aspiring creators?
Alexandar Timotic:
First of all, I think we should use every technique and medium that we have available today in our art. Because 50 years ago, 100 years ago, people didn’t have the options that we have today. But today we do, so I think that we should use everything that we can in our art.
Secondly, I would say: Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to make something. And finish it. People usually they start doing something, and when they don’t get result that they want in the process of making it, they never finish it. I think it’s extremely important to finish the work that you start. Maybe it won’t be perfect, maybe it will not be what you expected, but finish your work. When we finish our work, maybe we can change something, we can build it up. Maybe we will say, “Okay, this is not what I expected. I will try again, I will try something new”, but finish your work, and don’t be scared for it to not be what you wanted. Maybe it will be failure. Maybe you will get something totally new that you didn’t expect, and it will be great. Maybe in five years you will turn around and say “Oh! This is good. In this moment I thought it was totally awful, but now it makes sense”. So I think it’s important not to be scared of failure.
The first time you draw a circle, it’s not going to be a circle, but when you do it 5,000 times, it’s definitely going to be perfect. So, learn by doing, believe in the process, and never give up.