INTERIM: Studio: Sept ‘10
Apocalypse: The Unveiling
Prague crossroads has been described as an international spiritual centre – a suggestive location for, discussions, performances, meditations and happenings. Events held in this site are “…based on respect for the multicultural diversity of today’s world, the main mission is to respond to a widely held need for an unbiased creative dialogue of people of different faiths beliefs and professions with regards to the state of today’s civilisation and the dangers it faces, it’s hope and future”.
We need to respect this mission in proposing interventions into the site. Throughout it’s restoration the body of the building has undergone an operation of sorts. Reconstruction, restoration and removal… an uncovering of a past that we can only attempt to understand through what is recorded.
I am proposing that this site, undergoing it’s own ongoing restoration, becomes, if only temporarily, a site of personal spiritual reconstruction, renovation and removal.
Coupling this restoration of site: [in contrast…a restoration that begins to mix the intentionality of the original makers with appropriation of the renovators and proposed contemporary use], with a personal restoration: an act that externalises and interrogates the individual’s past as a form of therapy. Locating the point of focus as the live body in contemplation.
During this performance the site undergoes a spatial transformation that runs concurrently with acts of spiritual transformation. Unveiled, the live body converges on the, once audience, and invites them one by one, to question and learn about the performers’ personal experience. The space becomes a place of communication, an open clinic for the discussion of spiritual/ and holistic well being initiated through exposure to non-conventional acts of self-restoration. [attempts at resolution of inner conflict].
We are entranced daily by the manipulated image, projections of a society, a reality, that may or may not have ever existed. We begin building our thoughts based on man-made illusions of utopia. We clean debris in a post-apocalyptic state or we are striving for constant restoration or completion. Fictional springboards that lead us to not much more.
This performance deals with an immersion in the projected image (literal and metaphoric) versus the power of physical presence and happening.
A centerpiece sinks from the ceiling, anchored to projection screens existing in a cavity, a second skin that lines the building, perhaps a photo-real rendition of the interior of the church itself, if it were to be so reconstructed that all trace of history becomes lost; a façade of the church brand new. Projected images drench the space and envelope the lowering focal point in the centre. This sinking is coupled with another event. Apocalypse, unveiling. A deeper skin through which light only bleeds through and the projection screens are lifted seemingly with the weight of the attached sinking. Warm light floods the cavity and melts the blue tint projections and we are presented…
… With the live body, the physical presence, as silhouettes performing individual acts of restoration. The central weight reaches the ground, this encasement, is filled with soil. The bodies above leave their compartments and proceed down and through into the central space, they are each carrying the remnants of their extraction, reaching the soil and the audience, they interact with the soil and their object, planting, watering, building, releasing….
These people retreat to their spaces in the skin and invite members of the audience to come with them, to learn about what just occurred, to discuss their thoughts, to reminisce. and discover.
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