With the exhibition in Brighton ahead of us, and only a rough idea of what we were planning on showing, the main task of the week was to make sure the performance was planned and practiced. After much thought the final idea was for us was to be having a chat about our childhood and past experiences, illustrated with videos of such activities. Little did the audience know but most of the footage would actually be taken from YouTube or Vimeo or any other Internet video host. We then buried the material we found deep in our filing system so that when it was recovered it did truly appear to be a memory of our own. The performance had 3 sections - the first being the most believable, the second being to question whether these are truly us or not and then the final one was obviously not us. These stages were accompanied by the physicality in which they were revealed – we had pre recorded the screen of the performance so that was people were actually seeing when they looked at the looked at the projection was not live but in a film. The first stage we tried our best to make it look as real as possible, the second we would occasionally lean on our hands while the curser was still moving and then finally we would actually stand up and walk away from our laptops while everything is still moving. Another element of questioning comes in due to the fact that we’re on two laptops but it’s being channelled into one screen (how?!). To contextualise it slightly, we start with a genuine film of Sid at sports day. He’s about 6 or 7 and he’s in a skipping race which he’s losing and consequently throws down the rope, starts crying and walks to the end of the race. But since he’s so slow the race behind him has already started (one in which his sister is in and loses as well). We then share films back and forth until it gets to the final stages where Sid is now an American girl winning a spelling bee. At the point Sid asks Jim if he’s ever won anything and then Jim replies with ‘Well now you mention it, the only thing I’ve ever won was the race at sports day when I was about 6 or 7’. Jim then shows the film, which was at the start but points to the guy at the front instead of the teary, eyed Sid at the back. We then have a very short, self referential, ending chat about how it’s interesting that the only way we can remember doing all those things is that they were caught on film and the idea that when we tell the stories attached to the films they are regularly distorted due to the nature of ones memory.
We planned for the performance to last approximately 6 minutes (2 minutes per stage). It was all planned and we were about to head off the Brighton to set up the day before the exhibition. However, mere minutes before we were to set off we received an email saying that our performance ‘cannot be facilitated’. This was fairly frustrating for us but we decided not to give in and instead of just saying that we wouldn’t show anything, we got the email that had been sent and printed it out (a2 size) and took that to the space with the intention of laying it over a light-box in a analogue screen-y sort of fashion. We were there for about 3-4 hours setting up since we had to wait for various things to be moved around and waited for other people to turn up (while our own piece was set up for almost the entire duration of our stay). We then left and were informed by a friend that was exhibiting with us that the co-curator (who had sent the email) had removed it once she’d seen it since that she had felt it made her and the event in question look bad. Our friend attempted to reason with her – suggesting that it wasn’t an angry response but merely a by-product of events that had occurred even had elements of site-specificity. She was unable to see reason and therefore, in an act of solidarity, all the work that we had submitted as a group was taken from the space.
When we heard the news we were some-what amused and therefore wrote a ‘very disappointed’ email (shown with the original one below) attempting to reconcile what had happened with the hope of creating a new piece consisting of a dialogue between us and them.
