Attending the Sao Paulo Bienal, and taking part in the 'Perpendicular Bienal' intervention was a collaborative endeavor with Honi Ryan. Check out her blog update about it here!
Space Holding Being - 1.5 hour Performance. In Collaboration with Honi Ryan, a socially engaged performance artist, expanding on the ideas of life as art- or the blurry edges between the two- influenced by her recent practice based research in 'the refusal of labour' - we decided to bring our laptops and note books and use the free wifi of the 31st Bienale to respond to our emails and take care of logistical things in our lives- Since so much of it is now on the internet. Honi had her stetoscope (something she does usually keep in her work space) available for people to have her 'heartbeat conversations'. What became interesting apart from the clusters of people that gathered around us to organically be a part of (without even knowing it) the 'intervention piece' we had set up titled 'Space Holding Being' were thoughts that came up later in the day when we decided to schedule in a walk away from the Ibirapuera Park where the Bienale was located. Questions regarding safety and the difference between the monetary and the intellectual value of our MacBooks! All of a sudden, in retrospect, we wondered if we had been ignorant to be showing off our computers as a part of the performance in a country and culture that we are not very familiar with. And on the opposite end of the spectrum we wondered if having these thoughts was us being overly cautious; somehow making a judgement on the society around us. There was no resolution to this- just questions- which can be extended and developed through letting them sit and through talking to more people.
Notes on Not-Knowing is a two person telepathic engagement that Honi and I developed in early August 2014 in Berlin. And now we brought it with us to the Sao Paulo Bienale for the Perpendicular Bienale Intervention. The text based work demands silence, and focus on the connection between two people. The nature of this work is the kind that doesn't cease to surprise amuse and humilify its participants. For the first time, we opened the piece to the passer by- and let people try their telepathic abilities (paired perhaps with chance and coincidence). What emerges is something between a poetic and fragmented text with moments of harmony - a series of moments shared as a connection, embodied in a text. (click the image for documentation) and here for a link to Honi's blog; documentation of the first time we did 'Notes' in Berlin.
Act of Being ; Active Reading/Writing - 15 minute action. Walking through the gallery space of the Bienale event- one person is reading from a book out loud (not to ‘spectacularize’ the self, but more as though it is an internal process of understanding/observing art). As this is happening the other person is writing/taking notes (with creative liberty- to highlight writing as a form of looking at art as well as the only ‘true’ documentation of this event/performance). This was an ‘invisible performance’ (a term used by the ‘Perpendicular crew’) for by the third day of the Perpendicular Bienal intervention the security officials were highly uninterested and were escorting people out of the exhibition space even if there was a slight hint of them seeming to be enacting a performance or doing something out of the ordinary.