Furniture without Memories, performance. 2017.
  • Exhibition text
    Furniture without Memories, is a durational play based on a geometric imaginary of the subject and a parametric understanding of space through what is contained in it. Furniture without Memories can be understood as pseudo-improvisations. Pseudo-improvisation means a contradictory building. The piece appear to be an improvisation but is structured extremely precisely. The perception of improvisation stems from the transaction with what is available in the space of presentation and using the human subject as an active deliberator of relations that already exist. This deliberation contaminating the audience makes the objects in the performance real as oppose to abstract, a property inherent to the objects means of production, marketing, handling and recollection. With the performance work the aim is towards an undoing that demands the claim of the ‘pseudo’. This undoing is because of the performance’s pragmatic organisation. One can claim that this pragmatic organisation is close to an ethics as much as to aesthetics. These ethical and aesthetic concerns performed within a geometrics, through the geometric imaginary of the subject. Through the clashing of the improvisational and the designlessness, with an extreme site sensitivity and precision, the work points towards a kind of poetics in contingency. In this setting the body becomes precarious and precariousness becomes a new form of being, as the space is reclaimed as a topological one without the distinction of front and back, inside and outside and before and after. The body in this work is a political, knowing, vibrating body. The performance begins with what appears to be cleaning the room's floor. However what is happening is not an act of cleaning even if it ends up cleaning the space. The act itself is not done to disinfect the room from its past and begin anew. The act is not done to symbolically summon a new space either. With a sweeping action the residue on the floor is gathered in the centre of the room. What the act entails is gathering what used to be scattered in the room into a central position to claim the invisible visible. While cleaning is a gesture of claiming a space with an intimate action, gathering is claiming the space intimate by the play of invisibility in human (in)sensitivity. The second effect of the gathering is making it available for a repurposing of the room with a geometrical imaginary of the subject. The broom scans the room from one point to an other creating diagonals, forming possible paths. In a networked setting these diagonals not only refer to themselves but also to the lines that are not created by the artist. Scanning does not excavate. It only acknowledges what is underneath. Repurposing the room with a geometrical imaginary of the subject entails horizontal action. Horizontal action can be defined as actions that occur by the sole contact of two things without superimposing ones hierarchical precedence. The performers body pushing a donkey across the room is purely making contact with the object. From this contact contamination occurs. Contamination doesn’t only changes one side of the interaction but equally both sides, generating transformation through encounter. Similarly when a tune is played on a piano by the structural properties of a cloth hanger contamination happens. This occurrence answers an important question; how might a gathering become a happening that is, greater than a sum of its parts?.
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