ma

Sleeping on a chair, radiating subtle grace of a limited edition silk ragdoll sitting sideways on a scooter speeding down a night-painted town. His head rests against a concrete wall of a deconsecrated chapel, his observers far from pretending not to feel cold at 10 p.m. somewhere in October. Is there really a dream flashing by behind the sleeper’s immaculate face?

Ma Liuming

speedy oranje

inside a tent filled with artificial twilight
lead into a corridor narrow and dark enough to give a feel of a train passing through a bottle of ink

therefore

functionally placed inside a lion’s cage, with the lion embodied in a slim figure of a man with black trousers and overall, who looks like slowly, but resolutely approaching me

barefoot

his face with a cropped white hair frame – a style not far from what a Roman Emperor electoral candidate’s would ask his stylists for

hic sun August the August aka T

somehow

he keeps looking at me but it is a look you give a snowman made of complexionless ideas

indeed

this makes one feel very transparent

as he is getting closer I wonder if he would make it through my body in the same fashion as ghosts routinely deal with fireproof walls

it feels like it and off he goes, leaving the tent, entering the light of the day

here comes a second one, equally barefoot, but much stockier, sporting colours of pumpkins and oranges , which make every single fold of his cushion-like frame come out

up in his face topped with froggy glass solution remindnig of a chief architect of yet another solution nicknamed the final, resides a pair of eyes which, like those of his partner, make this impression of their rightful owner’s soul having been fished out and sealed in a tiny flask marked “choking hazard”

his hand is cold as he grabs mine. It is a  fishy handshake, more or less the same grip you can expect when introduced to a well cooked lobster. Though there is no confirming message in his eyes, he apparently likes my bag, so he takes it. Simultaneously, he snatches a chair with a girl formerly seated on it, now rushing away, just too slow, for he is even slower, slow enough to catch her handbag and making her follow him outside the tent.

that’s Pumpkin aka R

Packing their chairs, the rest of the audience flows out as well.

Procession. T in the lead, then R lazily pulling his girl, then a cloud of people with chairs, giggling. On course to seek for a new stage.

Procession encamped in a park.

T and R spread around. Their walk betoking a pair of trees that has just managed to grow a pair of legs, but retain their sense of time…very, very slooooow.

they pick twigs and some of the audience, making them all dance in a circle the way you’d dance if the atmosphere consisted of mixture of vasoline and feathers

they clash, if something involving two objects meeting with a speed of a stoned snail could be classified with such a term

they clash and they entangle with tenacity of a very keen pair of lianas, merging into a single mass without the need for a meat mincer

a jogger decides to join in. He softly lands his precise body on the grass and goes for push ups delivered in a style aiming straight for divinity. With T and R busy making a panting skein out of themeselves, the three might surely get connected via a channel our brains can just dream of, unless the jogger is busy regretting nobody finds him a splendid opportunity for a youtube moment.

SPETTACOLO, says a mother, placing her two kids in front of T and R. Aware that this is a piece of theatre, the children go for LOL the moment T and R form a statue of a four-eyed god of honey.

a respectable lady of even more respectable age desperately seeks an explanation of what is this stuff all about

but nobody satisfies her

Reverse procession. Back to the tent, having fully explored the art of slowliness when making a 50 metres distance in ten minutes.

T and R petter out. The audience may need some time to regain their daily pace.

Thomas nad Ruhller – ORANJE

performance

procedure de Sade

She’s naked in a very formal manner. Sitting at a bar stool, facing the audience motionless, pale, her eyes indicating she might be busy chasing astral pets some five dimensions above the ceiling. Hands folded neatly in her lap, feet resting on a silver frame. She blinks repeatedly, her body trembles. Silence all over.

Pushed by a man in black, casually senior with a professional look, a nursing table appears on the scene, with two rows of glass flasks on board along with a tray full of napkins, a burner and a bowl containing something yet to be seen in action. The man’s look is fire-proof, no emotions leaking. He takes the first flask, lights the burner, then a stick with cotton wool soaked in alcohol. He finds a spot on the woman’s back, quickly puts the burning stick inside the flask and presses it against her skin. Trapped in the vacuum, the skin bulges instantly . He withdraws his hand – the flask remains sitting on the skin.

Soon the woman wears quite a revealing costume made of light bulbs. One by one, the flasks are removed, and there’s a scalpel in the man’s fingers. The skin opens like a smile.

The flasks go back on skin, filling with blood slowly.  It’s like a rubber tree being
tapped.

Flasks away. The napkins’ turn. Scent of disinfection. One by one, the man picks cakes of blood. They stick to the napkins, so they can be pegged on, just like washing on Sunday afternoon.

My neighbour softly leans against my shoulder. She’s unconscious.
We take her out, soon she wakes up. Was that a thumbing sound of one of the cakes hitting the floor?

Kira O’Reilly

performance

after kira 1

after kira 2

exhausting metamorphosis

She appears, with long black hair, wearing a grey dress. She throws away all of that, without interrupting her moves that stay somewhere between a ground beetle’s agony and a dog dreaming about chasing a rabbit. She fights tied up waves of a black mattress.

The struggle finishes the moment she puts on a cream skirt and a smart shirt. She walks on the waves, much relaxed now, they seem to have no trouble holding the weight of her bare soles. She stamps on, hits the mattress to provoke it, to make it draw aside and swallow her.

The audience holding glasses of wine gets spattered a little.

Patty Chang

Entwistle

(performance)

homogenise

A former C&A store.
No sad mannequins wearing spider webs.Just a continuous purr of blue conveyor belts.
Workers in blue overals busy putting something in
yellow boxes.A terrible sight of a fridge being slowly and painfuly disassembled, stripped to its
very core and far beyond. Soon there is no fridge, just an anonymous herd of spare parts.
The moving belt hurls to darkness of a machine that goes…

Once back on daylight, there are no spare parts any more, just pearls, ready to grant a shape to a plastic bag.

A private universe on its way to almost very nothing. All men equal, no matter if a SAAB or a pilot pen with a missing top.

No piano. No slow motion farewel shot. The credits follow:
pack of Hello Kitty chopsticks
878 pieces of data media
green plastic toy of american soldier holding his walkie talkie, found in the street
392 pieces of clothing
…

Michael Landy Break Down (self-consuming installation)

more downbreak

gutshaker

Sitting on a floor made of rough wooden planks. Above me a concrete shell of a deconsecrated chapel.The reading session has begun – citing the finest chapters of the Revelation. The very start is a news coverage of a trial of Balkan War criminals, served by a female voice – a synthesized voice, roughly as warm as liquid nitrogen.

The war criminal content smoothly shades into passages from the Old Testament. The voice recedes, giving way to something distant but inevitably coming closer and closer. It could be traffic pulsing at a spagetti junction, but soon it gains more power, turning into continuous din of thunder.

The sound starts touching the audience, at first very gently, but then, with the growing intensity, it is rather irrational slapping and I give up searching for comparisons the moment the vibrations invade my body. Their hectic frequency makes my eyes slip out of focus,the interior of the chapel turns into a TV image suffering from poor reception. We face wind coming from the floor – a sound gale trying to re-arrange our entrails.

Earthshaker (sound performance)