SMASHING TIME. Programme
OPENING: At 2 p.m. the dj Richard Walsh will inaugurate the show playing for us a vinyl with the song “Time Actor” by Richard Wahfried (Arthur Brown and Klaus Schulze under an assumed name).
SECOND ACT: At 4 p.m. Tracing the Water Cycle will be activated by its author Jack Thurgar. 15' approx.
CLOSING: At 5 p.m. Cristina Pedreira will close the show perform in live a cover of the song “Día de Fiesta” .
Repetitiveness / Sunday's escapism
Jayne Lloyd will be performing The Family Silver until she runs out of spoons. Inspired by a 1970s edition of Readers Digest Home Maintenance and Repair Manual, a bible for DIYers, Jayne will meticulously repair spoons following the steps on the manual again and again, in doing so, she will draw our attention to a haptic quality, something recurrent in her practice.
Recycling this practice Jayne will enter the poetic of repetitiveness drawing our attention on the value of time and small objects with no value.
The outset for Measuring System Used To Sequence Events is a previous ready-made by the artist, an anonymous cross-stitchery of a Concorde entitled Time. Nadia Berri will sit in front of her companion Time for the duration of three hours and will stitch a monochrome version of it. The act of counting stitches would gain importance over any preconceived image of time, so that the figurative image will get lost in the abstraction of counting. As a result of this, the monochrome cross-stitchery will hold the three hours length of the performance.
Sensual time
Composition#1 will trap our senses before we even realise. Ben Faga's distillery will be activated for the three hours time of the show, reminding us about duration, and modulating it under the influence of a fragrance. The flowers that have been previously collected around the building will reinforce our connection with this very precise moment and place, while the vapour of the machine will reminds us about a fleeting beauty.
With the installation Breathe With Me Sarah Pager reminds us about a desire for overcoming our human condition and our own vulnerability as an imperfect machinery.
The mechanical lungs seduce the viewer in a sort of possession. We will strangely recognize ourselves in waste materials, cardboard, wires and air, and the precarious constructions will bring the machine closer than ever. While progressively entering the space of Breathe with Me, we will experience its core as a humanoid that will breath for longer, so the materialization of time is a monster.
Breathe with me is a site specific installation which will breathe for the three hour duration of the show and will be destroyed after.
The subjectiveness of counting
Tom Pope's videos approach the fleetingness of a present that is permanently erasing itself and that we never seem to grab completely.
In his videos the act of drawing becomes a desperate fight for being in time , presenting the failure or the inaccuracy of the human hand, unable to become completely mechanical.
In his previous work in photography Tom Pope would also document certain “trials” using his own persona as a vehicle for a reflexion. If in the photography Tom tried conquer the “instant”, the snapshot, in One Estimated Minute and One Minute Count, Tom would try to synchronize his body with the perfect bit.
Many Moons is an ongoing project not only never ending in its nature as a loop but also in its creation being constantly added to, subtracted from and worked into.
Silas Money will open the filmic spectrum physically (working directly on the film strip, with organic cuts, scratches and collages). The Moons will not only stretch the linear time of the film into an organic movement, the moon will open the footage to other territories, moods and a primitive connection to an ever changing fiction.
Tracing the Water Cycle (A Live Ritual), is a live experiment in which the audience is invited to private room that will act as a periscope for exploring the outworld.
Jack Thurgar and his sophisticated map recycles a rich imaginary from different sources: re-contextualization of found footage, recordings and new fictions.
The installation will put together an impossible sequence in a form of live collage; from the open scene (sequence from the very first home-video from the artist) this intricate flow of water will travel in time and space, and while Jack Thurgar will be guiding us in the dark room, his alter-ego the explorer Solomon Wild will show us his personal recordings throughout his global wanderings.
Continuity and construction
Reverse Time Capsule will build an ephemeral structure out of found furniture, glasses, fabrics, soil and a variety of objects charged with the history of the location.
Thomas Poeser's compilation is made out of small decisions that will connect the objects for a length of three hours. The viewer will be challenged to imagine the possible meaning of these connections while the digital counter will reminds us about the fleetingness of a meaning.
Naturally Slow Buildings are reflections of tensions between control and unconsciousness. Mark Farhall's drawing processes set up certain rules or parameters in a trial for forgetting. In doing so, his constructions are not based on the author's last memories, but on the parameters for forgetting about them. This strong desire or attitude will enable a frame/nature for unconscious decisions and a complex temporal structure.
Past-time. In the recycling of waste, the slow and meticulous process of labouring is as inherent to the artwork as any visible material used. Terry Dynes will be engaging with his practice performatively, working for three hour shift. The artworks performative nature is given substance by the viewers gaze, Dynes has been a counting machine for three hours and the piece, embodying the three hour block of time will then be destroyed.
Fragmented views
Josh Baum will offer a fragmented experience of time.
The installation Stroboscopy will immerse us in the reality of an event and the illusionary leftovers of it.
The speed of the stroboscope synchronised with the speed of the water creates a space for a stationary illusion. In a sort of reversed cinematic experience, the installation will not try to recreate movement but to dissect it for us to see. In tis sense, Baum's delicate experiment goes beyond trickery inviting us to empathise with our own blink the rhythms of the room.
Cristina Pedreira will temporarily occupy the museum installing in the space Día de Fiesta (tr. Spanish bank holiday), a multidisciplinary project named after the song by the lo-fi band Indienella.
Día de Fiesta reflects on the common idea of having to have fun, and in her video-collages Pedreira documents a series of occupations where the artist claims joy in ordinary sites.
Pedreira's fragmented practice operates as brief fictions rather than the obligation of big festivities.
For Smashing Time the artist has decided to complement her project covering the song, source of inspiration, that will close the party.
Lucía Rivero
