The Red Carpet Treatment, Vincent Chevalier; ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland photo Pekka Mäkinen |
I approach the city as an outsider, a curator who already recognises the potential of live art to uncover schisms through which new meaning can emerge. However, I have never before seriously thought of walking as an act of transformation. I have legs, a map and some artists to guide me and through my own act of mundane motion I hope to discover an alternative city, a place that sits just outside usual perspective, recognisable but shifted into something moving or profound.
I have no previous experience of Kuopio, no prior affinity or particular empathy. My first impressions are of autumnal change, days caught between seasons with people in big hats and stout boots. Teenagers hang in bus stops and in the early hours old ladies wheel bikes through impressively drunken throngs hugging the pavements. In All the Demos I’ve Ever Been On, my partner Alex Bradley (UK) stomps the street in a repeated oblong for five days, a solemn, solitary demonstration of his own history of political activism. Transposing Kuopio for London, Kauppakatu becomes Embankment and Kaupungintalo the Houses of Parliament.
Every demo I’ve ever been on (1985-2009), Alex Bradley; ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland photo Pekka Mäkinen |
Live Windwalks, Tim Knowles; ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland photo Pekka Mäkinen |
Experiencing Rotazza’s theatrical illustration of a supermarket, Wondermart (UK), there was one single moment—when I was asked to open a fridge, stare at the white plastic and feel the frozen air—I found utterly transporting. Mostly however, I found the work predictable. Seduced by the tinned reindeer meat and weird mushrooms on the shelves before me, I embarked on an adventurous walking project of my own through the market. On the street, Vincent Chevalier unfurls a simple red carpet before him throughout his five days in the city (The Red Carpet Treatment, Canada). To see the artist approaching from a distance in slow chaotic determination is like watching a relentlessly bobbing minor television personality who remains just a little bit apart from the rest of us. It is a funny work of public endurance and there really are not too many of those.
Even in Kuopio the streets can be brutal. Despite the differences in their work, all the festival artists mention the pain and fear of being alone, of being vulnerable and the pressure of forever being on show. They talk of keeping to the path, following the map and ensuring always to bed down in safe places. They know their bodies’ limits. Blisters, wet feet, insect bites or any other minor affliction could ultimately finish the work. None of them speak of extreme acts of endurance but more of deliberately paced endeavours designed to push them on. The road acts as a score and their eyes are fixed on the approaching horizon, or what’s around the next corner or on the small path trodden by adventurers before them and passing less obviously between the bins, parked cars or trees.
Roberto Sifuentes, The "Pocha Nostra" performance intervention brigade, Kuopio airport; ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland photo Pekka Mäkinen |
Place is not static, it is rewritten by the performances that happen each day. I wonder if the psyche of Kuopio has been changed by the eight years that ANTI has been playfully interfering with its solid structures and tidy grid-like paths. I notice the public, their performances of not-looking played out in sideways glances or speedy road-crossings in the face of ANTI’s strange artistic goings on. In Bodycartography (US), a woman is framed by the dirty ramp into a car park as she bends double. Another woman hugs a bin for 10 minutes while a man lies on the pavement with a lamppost between his legs. How much do the artists disrupt the domestic goings-on? A few cars crawl past and a lady in a fluorescent track suit walks quickly as though she is part of the weird passing circus, but she is not. A normal town, on a normal day.
On a beautiful bright day, I walk with Stephen Hodge (UK) in SLaaristokaupunki [http://2ndlive.org/projects/slaaristokaupunki.php]. We leave the sensory overload of the outside world to enter a bland office space and sit before a laptop, a doorway into Second Life. Here I enter an island and walk under water without oxygen, traipse a beach without feeling the sand between my toes. I teleport from my island back to the beginning but with no sense of movement, time or distance. I leave Hodge’s’s guidance, Second Life and the office building to walk by the lake in the white light and perfect blue of the morning. It seems almost like dream space, caught between real and virtual, its lines so perfect and colours so precise. As much as I’d like to, I cannot teleport but I take comfort from the concrete certainty of the road and my heart thumping as I walk uphill.
At ANTI I find an adventurous spirit and strike out into the unknown. I give myself permission to walk where, when and however I damn choose. I walk without trepidation and look to the horizon where I meet helpful strangers. I discover beauty because I have looked for it. I find adventure in ordinary, wild or dirty landscapes. I am now a walker and I will only whisper the stories of my own vulnerability, of the darkness and its dangers, the bears and wolves that might lurk therein.
ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland, Sept 23-27, 2009
Helen Cole will present Collecting Fireworks, a growing archive of Live Art, as a Members Event as part of Performance Space, ClubHouse program, Sydney, March 2-3 and at Artshouse, Melbourne, March 17-19
Helen Cole is an independent producer. She was formerly Producer of Live Art and Dance and the Artistic Director of the Inbetweentime Festival of Live Art at Bristol’s Arnolfini, where she will continue to program as Associate Producer of Live Art and festival director. In 2009 she was awarded a £280,000 Paul Hamlyn Breakthrough Fund award, granted to “exceptional cultural entrepreneurs at a critical point in their careers in the UK.”
RealTime issue #95 Feb-March 2010 pg. 19
© Helen Cole; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]