Daily Practices
Daily Practices
Maintaining a daily routine is my way to give a performative structure to the day and an alternative to keeping a studio. I’ve been keeping an ever changing routine since 2010.
״When we arrived at our artist residency in MAI West San Francisco the space was a mess: garbage, construction tools and art works all piled up together; chaos. It was also a 10,000 sqft of storefront space near Union Square, so it was a central visible chaos. So the first thing we felt we must do after emptying the space, was constructing time. In part, because the space could be viewed from the street, but mainly because I felt that these strong foundations of time would help in holding the space and me in it.” - Lital Dotan, interviewed by Marina Abramovic, 2011
More than a decade has passed since I constructed a daily routine as a way of living, and it seems this simple arrangement of time is inseparable from my performance practice today. Twelve years, three continents, nine (Glass)houses later- the arrangement of time does change a bit but the principle of the daily routine remains one of my strongest anchors and deepest points of departure. Some of the original prompts remained in tact, some were added or subtracted, as life shaped to hold much more than my own practice (carrying twins, caring for a family, teaching schedules, an evolving practice). my approach to time also evolved, not reliant on time as counting but rather as duration, of solidification and dissolution of fragments in time. This also led me to create an automated daily routine (2021), a room that is entirely operative as a support system for a daily routine regardless of my presence or absence, further contemplating the question of what happens to a performance when the performer has left.
Photography by Eyal Perry