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n stern · Dublin (Ireland) · Oct 27th, 2007 12:34 am · 16 votes · no comments made
performance 2 (passage), by photo by Rat Western
performance 2 (passage) video - theora available via link in the article
by shot by Anthea Moys, edited by Nathaniel Stern
Images
Prelimenary sketch for performance 2 (passage)
CC BY 3.0
The public took to playing in the structure, giving it a performative element
CC BY 3.0
The performance piece took place in Joubert Park in Johannesburg
CC BY 3.0
The first performance piece took place at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik
CC BY 3.0
Some of you may remember the performance I and my fellow artists-in-residence did at this Summer's iSummit; it was a public intervention whose design and documentation were all under a CC BY licence. An architectural piece made of rope and per-formed around and on the square in Dubrovnik - which unbeknownst to any of us, would quickly become a game and playground - we called it The Wireframe Series: Sentimental Construction #1.
A continuation from that work, performance 2 (passage) is a similarly site-specific, publicly performed structure made of rope - the design modified to more readily accommodate games and play. The piece, erected in Joubert Park, Johannesburg South Africa (2007), twists the idea of 'public space' by its double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch its form outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the park's inhabitants, which gives the structure a performative turn.
Although the design is, itself, a passage - several doorframe shapes in series, swinging freely from atop four wooden poles - it can only move between hard and soft, virtual and actual, public and private, through its contact with people. This is juxtaposed with the inconsistencies of South Africa's major inner-city: crumbling art deco buildings surrounded by crowded streets and busy taxi ranks, all making way for the quiet of the Johannesburg Art Gallery's neo-classical architecture, and the leisurely games, picnics and ice cream stands in the inexplicably carved-out Joubert Park. The surrounding areas of the park have historically been a bundle of contradictions - before, during and after Apartheid - sustained as civic spaces because of how they're used by the public. performance 2 playfully mirrors the contradictions of this space and its utility, and further underpins the tensions between work and play, nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence.
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