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Aftermath: Uninvited Guests with Duncan Speakman
An archaic metal hospital bed; syringes, cotton buds, bottles of cleansing liquid and stage blood. Three performers (Neil Callaghan, Richard Dufty and Simone Kenyon) devise wounds for themselves and for one another whilst a fourth (Duncan Speakman) moves between them with a microphone (like a kind of stethescope), sampling the noises inside the performers’ bodies.
Instead of the typical doctor-patient ritual of diagnosis (patient points to where the pain is; doctor tends to it), one performer indicates where he would like his wound to be and another creates it. The marks are produced with skill. A flesh-coloured putty is rolled between the fingers then painstakingly applied to the hand with a spatula; a needle draws a thin line in the raised skin before fake blood is added, often drop by drop with a pipette. The care and precision with which the performers slowly create these fake injuries is at odds with expectations around violence. I start to invent scenarios to explain the gashes: the woman tripped on a cracked paving stone; the man in the suit was punched in a lunchtime brawl. The performers contemplate their own wounds with detachment; sometimes they smile at one another as though congratulating themselves.
There is something satisfying about the work appearing in a live art context. It references the kind of body art of pain made iconic by Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic, Orlan and others. These marks are not real. Yet despite being so close to the wounds, indeed despite seeing them being made, it’s hard not to be taken in. The room is hot. I start to feel squeamish. A hand is dangling in my face, dripping with fake blood. There are already bloodied footprints on the floor. As the work progresses, the narratives I am creating have to alter. The accidents must become more serious. Now we are in the world of car smashes, train collisions; the passengers too damaged to recover. Cuts multiply like a strange contagious disease, a cruel science fiction scenario where they are growing on the walls. Hours later, the room looks like a murder scene; later still: something out of a horror movie. By the end, even the viewer is being “wounded,” our participation made explicit.
The effect of this disturbing and visceral experience is to confront us with our own vulnerability, our fears. It is as if living out these terrors might somehow diminish them. It also plays on our reluctance to look and our inability to look away, something recognised by the documented accident photography of Enrique Metinides. We are caught in this dilemma but the durational nature of the work allows us to leave and re-enter at will, coming back to gawp at the objects of our fascination until we can bear it no longer. And just as real patients might take home anything from their hospital wristband to their gallstones (bottled) as a testament to their survival, so Uninvited Guests provide us with an open sore of our own.
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A Geography of Longing and Belonging: John Gillies’ Divide
Though conceived as a single screen work, John Gillies’ black and white digital film Divide is here re-configured as a diptych and an installation. Two screens face one another, the viewer invited to sit between them. One shows the film; the other footage of heavily pregnant sheep, panting.
In the wilderness of the Australian landscape with its wide open spaces and its woodland, an epic journey of four men across the country is taking place. Alongside them, a herd of sheep (animals outside of their natural habitat.) The film’s emphasis on texture renders it visually seductive. Gillies focuses on an anthill; the corrugated wool on a sheep’s flank; waves in a bubbling stream; crisp paper coasting the air, a grizzly beard. The work sounds incredible too: the pounding of hooves; sheep on ground; rushing water; crickets. It gives the film its rhythm, pulses through it. As the journey progresses, the group thins. A tree collapses, crushing one man under its weight; another rider is thrown from his horse. There is a sense of nature almost overwhelming them.
As well as being metaphors for the collective, the sheep also have obvious religious significance. At a later sheep-counting, the only lamb has disappeared. Eventually, a man returns holding it in his arms. He shakes his head. Is this Abraham’s sacrificial ram? This possibility is echoed in the use of Biblical text. A disembodied voice reads from the Old Testament, emphasising its intractable focus on the blessed versus the cursed. Herein lies the heart of the film. The politics of exclusion fostered by the Old Testament relates to the men’s desire to conquer the land, to find their place in it. These men look slightly incongruous, then there is the additional surprise of coming across a Chinese opera singer in the middle of the forest. His music represents another difference, a cultural tradition not associated with that landscape. The imagery changes too: now we see the delicacy of a lantern glowing in the forest; a diamante headress; a mirror. At one point, texts, both handwritten and printed, are discarded, the pages torn from a volume as a man trots through a forest of paper bark trees. Here Gillies seems to be referring to written narratives and discarding them, reminding us that the (his)stories that have been told are always inscribed with the ghosts of the ones omitted.
A sense of longing and not belonging suffuses the work. Eventually the uncultivated land is literally cracked, fissures in dry earth. At the film’s close, the sheep are running so fast across the screen that their bodies are abstracted, their movement fluid as waves. Is this Moses’ sea? I turn to face the other screen. A solitary inquisitive sheep is watching over my shoulder.
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Lipsynch: Robert Lepage
As part of his collaborative working process for Lipsynch – improvisation, actors as co-creators, multiple authors, a lack of scripts – theatre director Robert Lepage asked participants to bring a text or object to rehearsals. Dramaturgy consultant Marie Gignac’s contribution was an 8mm silent film of her father who died when she was thirteen. This developed into “Marie” where a character’s asphasia results in her forgetting the sound of her father’s voice. Marie (Frédérike Bédard) thinks if she can just discover what he said, she’ll recover him. But when she hires a woman to lip-read old film reels, she’s disappointed by the meaningless exchanges. “It’s pretty banal,” she says; “That’s life,” the woman shrugs. Persisting, Marie asks an actor to dub her father. After three hilarious attempts (he sounds like a dalek, “a Martian in Bugs Bunny,” a drunk) she tries it herself. A voice comes from nowhere; her father’s voice. “The voice is inside you,” her sister says.
This is just one of nine characters’ stories unfolding over nine hours. The first concerns opera singer Ada (Rebecca Blankenship) who witnesses the death of a young mother on a plane and goes on to adopt the orphan she calls Jeremy. Another shows Jeremy’s (Rick Miller) quest to make a film about his dead mother; another Detective Inspector Jackson (John Cobb) investigating a suspicious death and trying to find a tango partner to replace his wife; yet another a raucous funeral. As with all Lepage’s epics, Lipsynch is more an event than a show. The Barbican’s theatre is packed, there’s a sense audience members are fans happy to share chocolate and opinions while they watch an increasingly layered narrative explore voice, language, and speech as discrete entities.
In order to concentrate on the notion that voice is genetic, is almost part of the fabric of the soul whereas language or speech is encultured, Lepage courageously eschews the stunning visuals for which he is known. So sets are witty and efficient - the side of a plane morphing into a train - but not spectacular. Instead, there is a glut of sound from singing to speeches, to a baby’s cries, to advertisements, to canned laughter. In an L.A. restaurant, conversation is punctuated with simultaneous translation, ringing telephones… Characters switch languages as do actors – text is in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian. On occasion, where surtitles are unclear, we are immersed in pure sound and sometimes, as Jeremy tells us, music transcends where language fails. As her son departs for California, Ada sings Symphony no. 3, Górecki’s lament in which the Virgin Mary asks Jesus dying on the cross to “Share your wounds with your mother.” In other episodes we learn: we can speak without saying anything (President Bush is quoted); the content of speech – however plaintive or important – can be reduced to an analysis of harmonics and frequency; by recording permutations for British Rail announcements, you could read your own obituary. And death does not mean your body stops farting.
To its immense credit, Lipsynch is often very funny, moving, insightful, and never boring. It deserves multiple viewings to appreciate all of its references and nuances, the motifs of loss, of absent fathers, biblical characters, dualism; the incredible performers who take us on journeys as their multi-faceted roles age, change context, or gain knowledge. Yet for all that, and for its previous incarnation in Newcastle as a five and a half hour work-in-progress, it doesn’t quite cohere. Perhaps it’s because the narrative’s emotional treatment of prostitution, its insistence on victims, is overbearing even in the context of nine hours. Despite Sarah Kemp’s faultless acting, her role is such a cliché it’s almost parodic (she’s a street prostitute, formerly drug-addicted, sexually abused, raped, self-harming victim of incest, but too honest to steal). Later, in Nicaragua, we witness the fate of Lupe (Nuria Garcia) Jeremy’s birth mother who is just fifteen when her uncle sells her to sex traffickers for $600. The two stories are subtly linked (Sarah is from Manchester, Lupe is in a German brothel dancing to Manchester band Joy Division; there’s the possibility that punter “Tony” who demands Lupe’s services is the same Tony who raped his sister Sarah as a child). Even accepting the premise of their inclusion (giving a voice to those that do not have one), this begins to feel like a cross between a harrowing documentary and a bad soap opera. Only when the tone, rather than content, of speech is emphasised (as in the comic scene where the middle-class presenter of a radio show asks Sarah and male escort AJ inane, prurient questions) are we reminded of Lepage’s intention to emphasise the difference between internal voice and language as learned behaviour. The other ideas in those episodes - reinventing oneself through voice; the impact of accents; how the car, voice mail, microwave speaks but humans fail to communicate – appear incidental.
Conversely, the parts that resonate most are those where narrative is secondary
and where the interplay between voice and image is explored (which is, after all, what lip synching is). When Jeremy turns film-maker, sound and image are divorced and remarried. Foley artists recreate every effect; dialogue is dubbed into French. At neurosurgeon Thomas’ (Hans Piesbergen) request, Marie tries to give names to child-like chalk drawings and says arab rather than arbre, noting the difference one letter can make to signification. Head bandaged post-operation, Marie sings Gregorian chants into a machine. The patterns made by her voice are projected onto the screen behind in a series of vertical lines on graph paper. They accumulate into thicker marks as echoes increase; thicker still: lines like bundles of sticks across the page. In disturbed sister Michelle’s story (Lise Castonguay), shapes press against transparent clinic walls as she hears voices; later snow falls against a bookstore where poetry readings are held and a girl in an orange dress hop skotches along the pavement to the sound of traffic. It is these moments where Lipsynch is truly magical and becomes about those metaphysical enquiries - where do lost and forgotten memories go? Do men stammer more because they are more vulnerable? Is God just the human brain’s best creation? – that make us want to keep listening.
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Pillow Talk: Deborah Pollard’s Shapes of Sleep
Representations of sleep in Western Culture tend to emphasise its proximity to death (consider Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty or the “sleeping sickness” investigated by Oliver Sacks and dramatised by Harold Pinter in A Kind of Alaska). Deborah Pollard focuses instead on sleep as an activity. Over a period of eight hours - the length of a typical night’s sleep - five performers in night-wear lie on individual beds listening to sound recordings: “Put both hands on your neck…. Turn to the right…..Sit bolt upright…” There is a nice comic moment when they have to mutter: “It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.” These simple instructions relate to video documentation of sleepers (the original footage appears on a miniature bed in the space). The movements appear to derive from a restless night in a hot climate. We can make out individual voices and sounds of birdsong, a cockerel’s faint crow, playing on a loop. On the far wall is a row of little embroidered pillows decorated with video stills.
Other artists have explored the process of filming themselves in certain states then recreating their actions in performance (the Wooster Group did it with drugs, Forced Entertainment with alcohol). The fascination is the same: what do we look like when we lose control? Some viewers are drawn to the back of the space, walking between the beds, looking down on the sleepers. A man stands too close to the dark-haired girl’s bed; I suddenly realise how vulnerable she is (not surprising that Cornelia Parker’s installation placed sleeping Tilda Swinton in a glass case). Other viewers relax into the work, noticing how each performer interprets the same instructions slightly differently. I look for signs of tiredness or cunning (someone anticipating a command in order to gain as much time as possible in one position). If Shapes of Sleep were an hour long, it might appear choreographed, but as a durational installation the performers are no longer just performing sleep, they are physically exhausted by it. It’s a witty reversal of the notion of sleep as something that revives. Since the performers have their eyes closed throughout, it’s not surprising that one of them succumbs for a few minutes. I become infected by the hypnotic repetition, start to yawn, not out of boredom but out of tiredness.
Shapes of Sleep was conceived for a white space like the airy mezzanine of Glasgow’s Tramway where I first saw it. I agree with Pollard that in the Dark Studio, the work looks “more theatrical.” (The connection between sleep and darkness is too obvious; the minute white pillows more blatant). Nevertheless, its peculiar beauty is undiminished. The soft light throws shadows on silk pyjamas; arms and legs shift languidly. By the final hour, there is a haze to the space; it even smells of people sleeping. At the end of a hectic festival, I cannot imagine a more effective oasis of tranquillity.
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A Star is Porn: Tim Etchells’ Starfucker
Starfucker: someone who fucks up stars, or someone who has an obsequious relationship with them? Tim Etchells’ short digital film comprises only white text on a black screen to the soundtrack of John Avery’s music. Titles appear and fade. There are lines that could describe existing movies (“Gene Hackman holding a gun”); and others that sound like mischievous wishful thinking (“Mel Gibson in excruciating pain”) Many could be magazine headlines (“Woody Allen fucking twins” belongs on the cover of the National Enquirer, surely.) The scenarios are often absurd and irreverent. Common to them all, is the use of famous performers’ names.
Celebrity has featured in Forced Entertainment’s work before. Their durational installation Twelve a.m. and Looking Down made use of cardboard signs which said things like “Telly Savalas down from the cross;” Etchells’ book Endland Stories introduced us to fictitious movie star Natalie Gorgeous. And it could be argued that Etchells is a celebrity of sorts himself on the live art scene. Actors can become interchangeable with their roles though, as can popstars with their personae. Forced Entertainment’s film highlights that confusion of real and represented in the image of Morgan Freeman playing the computer game Doom at Level 5, realising that the figure he’s been chasing all night bears his own face but firing at it anyway until the screen turns black. Equally, he references the sometimes intrusive extra-textual information that informs our viewing of films: “Christopher Reeves in a wheelchair,” it states.
In Starfucker, the conventions of the classic realist text are nominally followed. We have film titles and credits; names (like Marlon Brando) that re-appear in the context of different scenarios (are these the main characters?); and music that mimics that of Hollywood epics (harp crescendos, drum rolls, the clash of cymbals). Yet unlike the passive viewing experience common to the majority of cinema, Etchells’ work is closer to interactivity. We are given a setting, performers, action, but no visuals. So, like directors, set designers, costume designers, make-up artists etcetera, we invent our own visuals. “Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone sharing a shower”: what kind is it, I wonder? Is it a needlepoint shower in a room with glass walls and a view of the black desert sky? Or a dribble of water behind the mouldy curtain of a suburban bathroom? The more explicit and unlikely the images become, the more they seem to reflect our obsession with fame and with the visual. We are seduced by both in our thirst to always know more, see more. Was Etchells teasing us when he chose Hugo Glendinning (known for his beautiful photo-documentation) to video record the text? The work piles up celebrity upon celebrity (in a sexual sense in some cases) in an almost pornographic excess. But, like porn, still leaves us unfulfilled.
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The Shadowers: Monika Tichacek
A woodland scene. Birdsong and azure sky; pools of sunlight on dappled green. A girl - ebony-haired, crimson-lipped, sitting at the foot of a tree. An older woman (is this her mother?) lifting the skirt of the girl’s dress to reveal thighs stitched together like a grotesque doll. There is no text, no speech. Three performers enact macabre rituals in the dark. This is the world of The Shadowers.
The dystopian fairytale is the territory of writer Angela Carter, artists Paula Rego and Matthew Barney (particularly his Cremaster series), and film-maker David Lynch. Monika Tichacek’s video is reminiscent of each of these in its dark blend of the Gothic and the surreal. The work has the feel of a bad dream. It’s as if we drift in and out of consciousness, our sense of continuity fragmented by the work’s distribution across three large screens. An image will appear on one, then disappear. A girl standing with her legs apart, blindfolded, dress hitched up; the same girl seated on another screen.
Slowly, the video explores the notion of the sublime and the relationship of the (female) body to nature. The natural and the artificial are deliberately confused, ambiguous. Are those translucent pomegranate seeds or rubies that sit like bubbles of blood on the woman’s face? Butterflies and insects are embroidered from sequins in forest hues. There is the ominous, reverberated droning of bees. Sometimes the body is reduced to its animal impulses. One performer feeds off another’s face. There is violence: hair is grabbed to drag the body; elongated fingernails are nailed to the bark of the tree; a hair pin slowly pierces a woman’s tongue, securing her to a tree stump. Later her tongue is blue, her face bruised purple like battered fruit. Crawling through the foliage, the zip on a woman’s dress looks like a wounded spine. Despite their explicitness, there is an incredible beauty in the framing of the images. We are made to focus on minutiae: a close-up of a globule of saliva as it travels down the cat-gut strings; the movement of a hair; the quiver of lights like fireflies on a branch; the blur and sparkle of a jacket. We are not always sure what we are looking at. At times, images glow like jewels in the pitch night.
An accordion plays tango and two women dance together. This dance - said to have originated in the brothels of South America - is typically associated with sexual passion. We see the performers’ legs criss-cross against the screen until they have woven a spider’s web of threads, a metaphor for desire and how we become trapped within it.
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This Much I Know (Part Two) Special Guests
In grey caretakers overalls, 4 performers call one another on touch tone phones and make mock calls to unseen “characters.” When I come in to the six-hour durational installation This Much I Know (Part Two), Suzie is curled into the wall, sobbing on the receiver. At intervals, we’re played tape recordings of messages they’ve invited people to leave on the Special Guests’ answer phone between 12pm January 28th and midnight January 29th. What’s missing? What are they missing? What are they looking for? What are they hoping to find? people were asked. The replies range from philosophical enquiry about the nature of loss to the mundane misplacing of objects - like the man who’s always losing his glasses and his car keys and says it’s hard to find the latter without the former. There are also recordings made by one of the performers in the Arnolfini foyer at various intervals throughout the show. (The sound quality of these isn’t great.)
As the work progresses, it becomes clear that each performer has a signature. Suzie calls her mother: “Just phoning to see if everything’s OK and you’re not missing me too much;” Matthew is always expecting someone; Lucy rings “Sandra” obsessively, with an update on her progress through the day. The behaviours and codes around telephoning are acutely observed (the lovers: neither of whom wants to put the phone down first; the family catch-up that goes on forever). The importance of the telephone to our lives is also explored. It can be a lifeline; a source of irritation; an interruption; an accomplice to deception. The experience becomes cumulative and more rewarding. For instance, Suzie tells her mother on the phone that a man has come into the room and he may be “The One.” It becomes clear that she’s talking about an audience member. He blushes. She asks his name. At her mother’s prompting, she asks what he does for a living. Much later, she references this moment so it becomes an in-joke for those of us who were there at the time.
The Arnolfini’s Gallery 5 is packed for much of the day and there is a real sense of camaraderie amongst the audience. This is wonderfully manipulated without it feeling manipulative. The performers get us all to cheer when the next person walks in; they offer us cups of tea and throw us chocolate biscuits. Performers Matthew Austin, Lucy Gibbs, Nina Wyllie and Suzie Zara are all absolutely compulsive. Even after hearing the same elements over and again, I am convinced by their veracity, impressed by their concentration and impeccable comic timing. People spend a long time here; I am in Gallery 5 for forty minutes the first time. I need to see something else, otherwise I could stay all day. “No-one seems to want to leave,” one of them says. I feel like a guest who doesn’t want to accept that the party is over.
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Miguel Pereira’s Top 10 [Bristol]
For a show with so much death, Miguel Pereira’s Top 10 [Bristol] is hilarious. Its central character is a pop star with eyes painted on his eyelids. This image is one of many contradictions (Pereira’s eyes are closed, yet he looks as if he can see) and an indication that this is going to be a work that confronts us with our own voyeurism.
Video clips of an interviewee’s thoughts on death (the decorator who wants a Viking send-off; the twelve-year-old girl struggling to articulate what it means; the economist who tells us he might already be dead by the time we are watch this; an architect who suggests dying could be our most important experience so we shouldn’t miss it) are followed by enactments of Pereira’s demise. The structure of the show could render the work predictable, but its content is thought-provoking and the performances excellent. My personal favourite is the parody of Singing In The Rain with tin foil for puddles. A very annoyed lamp post, sick of being a backing singer as it were, pulls out an umbrella of his own. He murders Pereira, James Bond-style, and takes over his persona. The show’s concept - where the audience is invited to vote on the best death - is a logical extension of a cultural fascination with reality shows, celebrites and celebrity reality shows. There is a tiny museum in Paris devoted to counterfeit goods, displayed next to their authentic counterparts. Some are obvious fakes (a strange-coloured Lego called Daluland); others are so real that certain manufacturers (Levi’s) stopped making the originals because the market was flooded. This notion of the fake killing the authentic is another object of cultural fascination (A non-celebrity won UK Big Brother this year, pretending to be a pop star….)
Throughout, the show highlights its own artifice. There are boots that don’t fit; a fake gun that fails to fire after we have been warned that there will be a loud bang; a visible costume rail, prompt sheets, stage-hands. The announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, for the last time, Manuel Pereira” appears over and over. Curtains are drawn across the stage for a one-minute silence but the audience giggles during it at Pereira’s feet, the only part of his body visible. Pereira himself is re-invented from coke-head to comic (where dying on stage isn’t about his act falling flat but his bodily collapse, Tommy Cooper-style, mid-routine. “He was a funny man. Not a man who’s funny. There’s a difference,” intones his obituary.) Given this skill for change, it’s appropriate that he also assumes the guise of Madonna, postmodernist icon and mistress of re-invention. This fake pop star as real pop star recalls Gavin Turk’s Pop (1993): a waxwork of himself as Sid Vicious as Elvis. When Pereira Madonna is killed by the “real” Madonna (but obviously another fake), the two pose side by side (one bleeding from the mouth). The impossibility of knowing Pereira beyond a set of signifiers - black feather boa, velvet jacket, sparkly trousers, curly wig, shades - becomes apparent when an audience member assumes the costume and sings the hit song.
High art does not escape Pereira’s scrutiny either. To the strains of opera, he destroys the stage set, rips off his costume till he is naked, tries to pull away at his very skin as if seeking to reduce himself to an essence. Like a true star, Miguel Pereira’s legacy continues beyond his deaths. At 4.30pm, the results of the audience vote will be announced. I’ll be there. I hope they play “My eyes are green because I eat a lot of vegetables.”
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Esther Shalev-Gerz : Les Portraits des Histoires 1998 - 2008
In response to commissions, Esther Shalev-Gerz developed Les Portraits des Histoires (Portraits of Stories) over ten years (1998-2008) in Belsunce, inner city Marseille; Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris and Skoghall, Sweden; and latterly in Sandwell, West Midlands, where she pursued the curatorial enquiry: “What does participation mean?” Spending significant amounts of time in each place, she recorded citizens’ responses to this key question: “What story must be told today?” creating the portrait of a neighbourhood through its inhabitants. In the resulting works, over two hundred voices, five hours of video, and several hundred photographs, the disenfranchised, the marginalised, the lonely, the indignant but also the philosophical, the contented, and the ordinary speak their mind. From these personal histories or micro-fictions emerge grand narratives. Stories about hardship, injustice, love, redemption. Even stories about stories. Events are tiny - the girl who wore borrowed shoes on her first trip to see the sea, or momentous – the thirty-something who meets her father for the first time on an airport escalator. They make us question who has something worth saying or sharing? And who is supposed to listen?
Les Portraits des Histoires could also be thought of as l’histoire des portraits (the history of portraits). Traditionally, portraiture was the privilege of the wealthy, an opportunity to re-assert status by being depicted in fine clothes, within stately homes or on acres of land, presiding over families, subjects, staff. Identity and property were entwined. And even when artists flattered patrons, the vision was typically theirs. Here, as in previous works, Shalev-Gerz opens up this definition of portraiture. The photographs of participants might look like conventional portraits but are in fact stills from the videos. Displayed apart, they act more like movie posters making us wonder about the stories these people have to tell, making us question the preconceptions we have of them. Shalev-Gerz subverts the relationship between the artist and subject by directly involving participants in the artistic process from the outset. They agree the location in which to be filmed and where the video camera is positioned; they decide which story to tell with no limitations on whether that story is truth or fiction. So in Aubervilliers, a woman elects to remain out of the frame, only her reflection visible in a glass cabinet door, because she still does not have legal status. In managing their own representation, these participants have the opportunity to examine their psyche, to fashion identities, and to share the accounts they have given priority to in a democratic space where each voice is valued. We live in a culture where the voice is believed to be more authentic, primordial even, than the written word. In her project Shalev-Gerz highlights that the use of the voice should be preceded by considered thought.
Les Portraits des Histoires is as much about listening. Shalev-Gerz listened again and again to her participants during the editorial process; in the photographic stills static facial expressions or frozen hand gestures draw our attention to the ritual of speaking but also make listeners out of these silent contributors. In our role as audience we become confidants, accomplices. As Marco Polo insists to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.” We hear the girl in Aubervilliers whose parents died and who doesn’t want to be taken away from her foster home, conclude, bravely, “They say you should talk about these things.” Also in Aubervilliers, a mother who lives in a studio with her family – six people in a tiny apartment – tells how she has been asking the council for twelve years to re-locate them. Whilst these stories make us hope we aren’t the only ones listening, we suspect that, actually, we are.
Participants may reappear later in the videos just as in life our stories are not always linear, our memories do not necessarily cohere. Shalev-Gerz’s editing and montaging asks us to consider how one individual’s contribution relates to others’.
Images fade in slowly, momentarily transposed into the frame or sometimes onto the face of the current speaker, hovering like listening ghosts in the space of the Other. Out of these juxtapositions, these double portraits, new narratives emerge. Speakers engage in silent dialogues. In Skoghall, a man pondering “Who becomes evil?” gives way to a woman discussing the element of chance in gardening and nature.
Rather than this highlighting differences, similarities are revealed. Stories told in one context are echoed in another: the lack of time; the difficulty of being young. Relocation itself is a recurring theme, particularly in Belsunce where gentrification threatens to force locals from the area. Stories too do not stand still, they travel. Fairytales are re-invented in different national contexts, myths passed down orally through generations or circulated in cyberspace till they implode. Considering the multicultural societies which we inhabit - epitomised by the boules pitch in Marseille with players from twelve nationalities – and how many of the participants are immigrants, it seems apt that Les Portraits des Histoires is itself migratory moving from Aubervilliers, from Belsunce, from a church in Skoghall, to a gallery in West Bromwich where so many voices congregate in the same place for the first time, able to be read across Shalev-Gerz’s perceptions of time, space, and memory.
One more boundary is alluded to in the Sandwell chapter of Les Portraits des Histoires – that between The Public (gallery) and the public (inhabitants of Sandwell). A shot of construction workers in their yellow jackets reminds us the gallery building was unfinished when participants occupied it and agreed the locations in which to tell their stories. Via Shalev-Gerz’s project, these locals were able to insert themselves into the history of The Public, present as co-creators of the first work made there, present again in the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, their stories enmeshed in the fabric of the building like footprints lodged in wet cement. This seems especially important in the light of the controversy surrounding the building. One participant brings our attention to it: people thought it too expensive, he says; it was blamed for a loss of jobs, was “a long time coming.” He berates us: “But your attitude is - ‘I’ll never go in the building;’ you’re not going to give the building a chance, are you?”
And then you realise that, just by listening to him, you have already crossed that threshold. You are already inside, part of the story.
Based in Paris, Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognised for her seminal contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her ongoing enquiry into the nature of democracy, cultural memory and the politics of public space. For over 25 years she has led debates regarding participation and artistic practice. Her work has focused on interventions and projects in public space, taking the form of collaboration and exchange with audiences. She is Professor at the Valand Art School in Gothenburg, Sweden.
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An A-Z of The Ting: Theatre of Mistakes comprises 16 ebooks with documents (texts, letters, photographs, diagrams, artworks) drawn from this 1970s performance collective’s private archive and from original research conducted by Jason E Bowman and Marie-Anne Mancio. Each book has 26 pages, referencing the alphabet, however there is no more reason to begin with ‘A’ than ‘V,W,X,Y & Z’ and the democratic format of the set means entries are placed in unexpected proximity. Encouraging circuitous rather than linear, multi-perspectival rather than singular, readings and reflecting The Theatre of Mistakes’ interest in chance, mutuality, and inconsistency, the A-Z is part introduction, part photo-essay, part-question, and part gossip. Published September 2009. Created for the Diffusion Residency at Proboscis. Download for free.
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