COLLABORATIONS
With Investigation Three
(Rashmi Munikempanna and Robbie Lockwood)
34/71 BROADWAY MARKET
PERFORMANCE, FIELD RECORDINGS, FIVE YEARS GALLERY
FEBRUARY 2010
PROPOSAL
Robbie: To record in the field is to enter into a live space, one that is mostly unprepared, although the prepared may enter it in some form. This inevitably contains an element of the “document” and all the problems that come with this concept; how one enters into the space without unreasonably altering it, not forgetting that “one” is more often not native to the field.
Lucie: Sound resonates live throughout the field. Past struggles resonate within its present conscience. As a field study, with the conscience of the past and the sound of the present we listen, we capture and re-appropriate, in attempt to make a connection between these meta/physical fields and ourselves.
Rashmi: To look at the gallery as a field that is extendable to its immediate surroundings, opening it up. This process involves an awareness of the artist as a field in herself; bringing in what she hears, to be heard anew.
Investigation Three: We speak into a microphone, words that were clear and concise become cluttered and we wonder what this could mean. What’s this got to do with field recording? At which point the outside comes in…
On the surface speakers begin to tell a story of the immediate and recent present, but once scratched, you can hear the sound, or more accurately the non-sound, of what was. The ghost of another struggle in vain, played out in the name of local residents for local workers; now merely a poetic footnote in the gradual degradation of the community, to that of capital.
http://investigationthree.blogspot.com
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With Louise Ashcroft
HOUSE
2008
We were invited to do a site specific intervention as part of the Brasenose Arts Week at Oxford University. We investigated the ambiguous position we occupied in relation to the physical and social space of the college, complicated by the position of my collaborator as a former student and myself as an outsider. On the final day of the project (a culmination of weeks of visiting and researching Brasenose) we constructed a giant cardboard house for ourselves to live in on New Quad (the main lawn).
The colour of the cardboard was close to that of the stone and the structure echoed architectural details of the building. The shabbiness transience and vulnerability of the cardboard provocatively contrasted with the grandeur, permanence and solidity of the college itself. We invited interaction between these two spaces by asking the students for help building the house, thereby creating the possibility of breaking down physical and social divisions. We also invited them for drinks and biscuits. Most students although reluctant to help seemed intrigued and confused by the notion of this as art. They mainly interacted with the house in our absence in the form of graffiti and vandalism. Though they ultimately demolished it, for a time, it seemed to be accepted as a normal part of the surroundings.
The project revealed that whilst it was possible to integrate physically, the social space of the college remained inaccessible.
