Ties (2021), 23rd International Multimedia Art Festival, Novi Sad, Vojvodina RS

A few years ago, while sorting through my father’s belongings, I discovered 32 neckties. I decided to keep them, feeling that one day I would conceptualise a performance using them.

Neckties (or cravatte in Italian) are a piece of male apparel with origins tracing back to the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). During the war, Croatian soldiers - also known as Cravats - wore scarves around their necks. The French were so taken by this fashion that they imported it, adapted it in various ways, and began calling the scarves cravates after the Croats.

I recall an episode from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943): a Turkish astronomer speaks at an international conference wearing traditional Turkish garments and goes unnoticed, but when he dresses in Western clothes and speaks again, he commands everyone’s attention. The difference was only his attire, not the substance of his research. This memory has stayed with me.

Neckties convey an aura of respectability and dignity to those who wear them. Often, they serve as the primary male accessory through which bourgeois men can express their individuality in fashion.

To me, neckties symbolise the bourgeoisie: a class focused on profit pursuit, property protection, and ensuring inheritance for legitimate offspring. Publicly, this class emphasises profession and profit; privately, it centres on marriage and women.

The word ties refers not only to the neckwear but also suggests bonds that connect or sometimes constrain - both the life of a man and that of a woman.

In my own family, this dynamic was unambiguous. My father worked long hours as a lawyer to provide for the family, becoming absorbed in his own world, while my mother devoted her entire life to the family, never pursuing an independent life outside of it.

The vicissitudes of my family inspired the imagery for this performance, which came to me one early morning in the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness - a phase that always reveals truth to me. I saw myself wearing all the ties at once, struggling to breathe under their compounded weight. Then I saw them individually, tied and upside down: one transformed into a noose tightening around my neck, threatening to suffocate me.

That noose suffocated my youthful aspirations as a woman - and I allowed it to happen. The ensuing life became a patchwork of impulses, efforts, and trials, which I am still trying to understand.

Ties is a cathartic ritual for me, and I hope it offers an opportunity for reflection to all who experience it.

Video Spike Mclarrity