Piibe Kolka stages Andy Männik’s personal archive

Piibe Kolka’s lecture-performance about Estonian-born carpenter Andy Männik will premiere on October 15 at Kanuti Gildi Saal, a theatre venue, ERR reports. “It’s Not a Place, It’s a Shape. Andy Männik’s Archive” takes audiences into Männik’s personal archive.

Männik was a carpenter from Estonia who lived in New York and helped Steina and Woody Vasulka create the avant-garde art space The Kitchen. The performance tells a story of friendship and explores how people see one another across distances in time and space. It connects the wartime flight from Estonia in the 1940s with New York’s avant-garde art scene in the 1970s and the development of a friendship in the present, through the final decade of Männik’s life.

The work draws on The Kitchen’s early years and its “Bring your tapes” evenings, when artists made video recordings and created events around them. Kolka said it was not intended as a comprehensive biography, but as a formal experiment exploring what traces people leave and how they relate to an archive of tapes, bodily memories, bookshelf edges and unsent letters.

Kanuti Gildi Saal programme director Kaie Küünal said Kolka’s position as both documentarian and close friend of her subject made it possible to convey a great deal of time and history through an approach that was thorough, tender and personal.

Kolka is a filmmaker and arts worker who explores playful interpretations of real-life material. The performance develops work begun during a residency at Kanuti Gildi Saal last season.