It is not time now to find common ground, or to focus on the future we seek and dream of, or to respect the dignity of all human beings. We cannot raise our peoples /
We cannot raise the standard of living and bring happiness and glory to our people.
We, we cannot /
I believe that we cannot solve the problems of our time
I believe deeply that we cannot solve / that we cannot find/
we have different stories, and we lack common hopes; our values and our interests do not coincide, we do not look the same and we have not come from the same place/
The road ahead will be too long and our climb will be too steep and our destination will be too far away. We probably will not get there in one year or in a decade or even in a century, and in fact to be frank I have never been more certain than I am tonight that we will not reach our destination at all.
I've been hard at work on a new performance in the form of a speech for the performance maker Kate McIntosh, titled Although We Fell Short. Made from the ruins and fragments of many other speeches the piece sees material from a range of contemporary and historical political campaigns, party congresses, debates, resignations and revolutionary tracts in unexpected dialogues and collisions. Mixing more or less unrecognisable fragments from speakers including Kruschev, Obama, McCain, Thatcher, Blair, Pol Phot and many many others the work strains and stretches sense, constantly cohering, dissolving and then momentarily re-cohering.
The initial idea was to do something quite explicitly monstrous... a Burroughs-esque cut up of existing political speeches. I started in that vein.. but have been gradually adapting the approach, searching towards something a little bit easier to inhabit and which plays very much with address to the audience, familiar devices of speeches and political tracts, especially in relation to the way they try to 'form community', before collapsing into fragments again. Source materials have been very cut and mixed so there's not much recognisable or particularly iconic - a deliberately uneven surface much of the time, with jump cuts and incomplete sentences though chunks of tone and style remain. I've even been allowing myself the liberty to write and interject new material here and there!
The other thing I've found that been doing a lot as an intervention to the original texts is to play with more-or-less reversing the sense of sentences... a kind of childish occupation in some ways, but somehow applied to these materials it produces something quite revealing, crushing and weird - "Friends, this is our time..." becoming "Friends, this is not our time..."
Premiere performances are Saturday 26th November at 20:30 and Sunday 27 at 19:00 at Kaaistudios, 81 Rue Notre-Dame du Sommeil, 1000 Brussels. More info here .
The Brussels shows are presented in a double-bill with a new commissioned work by Eleanor Bauer, Parliament Without Words and both shows are part of a season called Spoken World.
In Spoken World, the Kaaitheater and Siemens Stiftung will be devoting theatrical research to the formal and substantive forces behind the speech. Forces that can lead a community to war or peace, to ‘good’ or to ‘evil’. Whether it is written beforehand or improvised on the spot, a speech is always given in a specific context, in a ‘here and now’ – just as in the theatre. Someone gives shape to an argument while an audience listens – just as in the theatre.
Theatre-makers from several continents will be creating a performance for Spoken World in which they examine their relationship with the speech given and make a space for it in their own political and cultural context.
There's another performance of Although We Fell Short scheduled for PACT Zollverein in Essen on Thursday 15 December at 19:30, also part of the Spoken World initiative. More info here . In that context it's a double bill with Mapa Teatro (CO), a new work Discurso de un hombre decente.
Although We Fell Short is written and directed by Tim Etchells. Performed by Kate McIntosh.
Lighting design: Nigel Edwards. Produced by Forced Entertainment.
Commissioned by Kaaitheater & Siemens Stiftung.
My work Will Be
(2010) features in the latest edition of Lumiere alongside works by
Peter Lewis, Jacques Rival, Tracey Emin, Martin Creed, Claire Fontaine,
Dominik Lajman and many others.
"The festival brings together 35 different installations created by UK
and international artists working with light in every conceivable way.
From dramatic installations, vast animated projections and rivers of
light, to subtle interventions on buildings, streets and bridges, the
artworks in LUMIERE will create a city-wide nocturnal trail that will
stop you in your tracks."
Family Matters: The Family in British Art
15 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery,
Castle Hill, Norwich, NR1 3JU
My collaboration with Vlatka Horvat, the video Insults & Praises is presented as part of Family Matters.
"Family Matters: The Family in British Art is an ambitious touring
exhibition that shows how the subject of the family has been and
continues to be a challenging yet enduring subject for artists. Divided
thematically, the exhibition showcases the best of British art with
works by David Hockney, Anthony van Dyck, William Hogarth and Tracey
Emin. Contemporary and historic works are juxtaposed to show how the
traditional family portrait has been replaced with a more frank
portrayal of the family. Formal portraits were frequently staged for
political or personal purposes, whereas the more recent works offer a
view that can only be described as ‘behind the scenes’ creating a
tension between the public and private portrayal of the family.
This tension between inside and outside, appearance and reality, can be
traced across a number of the works by artists including Thomas
Gainsborough and Johann Zoffany, British contemporary artists Richard
Billingham and Rachel Whiteread, as well as international artists Thomas
Struth and Zineb Sedira. The five thematic sections - Inheritance;
Childhood; Parenting; Couples & Kinship; Home - reveal a world of
shifting certainties for the British family through a range of media,
including film and photography, painting and sculpture."
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These images by Matthew Andrews. More info and pictures of the work 
