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CIRCA 113 review
Various locations in Northern Ireland: In Place of Passing
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Esther Ferrer: performance, St. George's Market, Belfast; part of In Place of Passing; courtesy Bbeyond
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The informal Belfast collective BBeyond come together to organise art events that fill gaps between the institutional spaces in Belfast, and around Northern Ireland. Free from the need to manage a venue and fulfil programming remits1, BBeyond discussions focus on artistic content, and attitudes are organic and responsive to opportunities that may arise in the city (a building is vacant, an event is taking place), as well as to suggestions that may come locally or from artists abroad. At a time when the wording of arts funding at least seems to push projects towards doing everything (or at least claiming they do)2, the need to have fluid organisational structures that function just on a project level, with distinct, modest and interesting aims, is very apparent. The do-it-yourself, homeless spirit of action and initiative arising from such collectives is one of increasing output, and reducing administration.
That said, it doesn't mean that the projects aren't ambitious. Sometimes without the umbrella of the venue, they are more so - there is no retreat, no HQ; you are out in some kind of open, in the case of the Bbeyond-organised event In Place of Passing, in many types of open. I quote from the event publicity: "Eight international artists...make in-situ performances in various locations around Northern Ireland over a five-day period...natural, rural, and urban - small town, big town and no town." Those invited were Myriam Laplante (Italy), Roi Vaara (Finland), Zygmunt Piotrowski (Poland), Esther Ferrer (France), Boris Nieslony (Germany), Elvira Santamarķa (Mexico), Kurt Johannessen (Norway) and Artur Tajber (Poland).
It is no small feat co-ordinating this, but you are flying to some extent by the seat of your pants; things are decided hours, minutes, before (which, importantly, shows they can be!), with switched-on minds, motors or hands at the ready, and a decent way of talking to people. Failing that, put obstacles into perspective, don't ask for permissions you won't get if you really mean to do it anyway, and get on with it. In such a project, there is a complicity between artist-organiser (as they all were) and artist-guests. Now there is a difference - the buck stops somewhere - but there is a tangible sense of a collective responsibility for making the project happen in the case of such an expedition. A fine working group was assembled, some organisers made work (Brian Patterson, Brian Connolly, Dan Shipsides, Alastair MacLennan), and the list of hosts and others was completed by James King, Eamonn O'Donnell, Christine Gilloway, Bag-A-Trix Action Theatre, and Sandra Johnston.
I saw them head off from Belfast, after missing nearly all the action in the bustling St. George's Market - but heard about Vaara's sporting of a birdhouse on his head, accompanied on this part-man part-aviary promenade by a cuckoo noise on a ghettoblaster; caught a glimpse of Ferrer walking on a trail of sellotape which unfolded under her feet, with the weight of her step; saw the wonderful array of dead beasts, odd ornaments, and mass-produced tat, and smelt those hot dogs.
Off they went then, on the bus that would carry them around for the next five days (like some team for an unexplainable sport...art? I'm kidding), heading northwards to the coast, where I planned to join them for the Rathlin Island leg. The North Antrim coast is fantastic, the thick atmosphere of Belfast city giving way to other ambiences that flow with the rhythms of receding conurbations and dissipating human denseness; yes, flying the flags of colour and allegiance that you see in Belfast, but they are different here, appearing as they do against the backdrop of open fields, and the traffic of country roads. There are many problems: hard-drug abuse (most places), boredom (most places), and more in outlying areas, but there are benefits from the sea and woodland air.
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Artur Tajber: performance, Rathlin Island, part of In Place of Passing; courtesy Bbeyond
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Rathlin Island itself is the only inhabited island off Northern Ireland's coast. Some seventy to ninety people live there all year round (the lighthouse man said), a population boosted in the summer. The forty-five minute, morning ferry ride over from Ballycastle was fairly calm, but with a sense of expectation in the air swelled by a camaraderie that had built during performance events in Derry city centre and Void Gallery, forays into Ballintoy, the Giant's Causeway and a nearby quarry. But, an island presents different stakes. I mean, once the last ferry is gone, where are you going, till the next one docks, the next day?
There was a feeling during those days, and I suspect throughout, of just seeing what would happen (perhaps barely anything at times), of a real desire to just find out. It was not that type of experiment which was predicated on achieving very specific objectives. Nevertheless, some things are measured and in place. The artists are informed by their experiences of the way that objects and people behave and interact, depending on the lay of the land. They are mindful of expectations and difficulties. Each brought some materials with them, whilst sourcing others locally. Furnished with these, and after some hours reckying, the actions began.
And so it was early afternoon, with the sun blazing, that we took the high road out to the RSPB observation station on the west of the island, on the Rathlin minibus tour. As the mixed bag of ornithologists and artists and tourists milled around, Johannessen, dressed in a black suit, went off, along the cliffside, until he came to a headland fit for his intentions. There he placed one end of a thick bunch of multi-coloured-cable telecommunication wires in his mouth and splayed the rest out towards the land's end. He stood there for a while. I squatted down into the cliff, as I have done before, to heat my beans whilst out on a ramble with John Mathews, who was filming on this trip, and just looked at Kurt. In the stillness, the absurdness, the something and nothingness, it occurred to me that the limits of communication are there in the cavity of your mouth. But then there is transcendence through volition; standing there you reach somewhere that you could not, Kurt, I suspect, show me a map of, or tell me about.
Off he went, then, and repeated the action in an adjacent field. Wonderful. Then Shipsides, another onlooker, walked off and out of sight. Shortly after, as you do on cliffsides, I went to see where he was, only to see him appear on the beach below. I couldn't help feeling, as I watched him on the rocks, with my binoculars and with my naked eyes, spinning an object on a leash at an ever-increasing distance above his shoulders, that I wished we had told more people. I wished more people were witnessing this...this what? Just a dynamic situation, somehow also relating to signals, transmission, voids - but very engaging, very curious. I wondered about running down to the RSPB station, but running was just a figment of my imagination in near thirty degrees celsius. And really, as the day wore on, that was what I was reminded of, brevity, and fragility, and accident, of just happening upon something. I thought of what you emphasize when you plan and lead people, versus what you affirm when you are spontaneous, and people go their own way, sometimes the same way as you for a while.
Back in the harbour area, around which most people live, Vaara appeared walking down the hill covered in black balloons, slowly, so slowly. Once he had arrived at a table, prepared with a cloth, glass and wine for a toast, he released the balloons into the sky. He slipped from the tableaux he had made with the landscape into a toast, of personal significance, with another artist. Afterwards, Ferrer - formerly of the group ZAJ - had gathered rocks, two for each of us, marked with our names, and placed them in a circle. She invited us all to throw one into the harbour, and keep the other. It's on my bathroom windowsill. She explained she is not so interested in ritual, thereby debunking it, and realising it. Two things at once - two stones - well one, I threw mine obediently into the water.
Tajber took a sign and stopped at points along the harbour, creating tableaux between his sign and texts and other structures in the vicinity. Johannessen reappeared with the cables, lapping in the water's edge. A still broken, unbroken circuit. People looked on, with all their various attitudes, taking notice and not.
This work was site-specific and not. I mean that it felt at times hallucinatory, and I can't imagine the terms of a site-specific hallucination.
Later in a roofless former kelp-house - the industry from which the island made money previously - Nieslony stood with a big rock on his head amidst other rocks, slowly falling away from the structure. Connolly created a sculpture from debris on the beach, where he found the colours of the spectrum. Johnston manoeuvred barefoot almost imperceptibly around the exterior, to whose walls she clung, before entering the doorway with no door, the inside where Maclennan stood amidst strips of paper and dolls, amidst a collapsing. I felt mourning, a slow and weighty passage of memory. Without romanticising, I thought about the unknowable regions of our relationship with the elements, our unknowable shape in history.
Commentary often talks of the power of the rhythm of performance, and I think its potential is to take us with it, to slip us into an indistinct space where our two lives, those of the gestures we pose, and the dreams we have (had), meet. Like at the kelp-house, thoughts slip into the other. This island event was unassuming, and imposing. Inconclusive but intentional, contradictory. A Midsummer Night's Dream, of magical transformations, when rules subside, I thought, as I watched the final action. Piotrowski in a field wandered around a neolithic stone...just wandering.
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Boris Nieslony: performance, Rathlin Island; part of In Place of Passing; courtesy Bbeyond
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I know the island. As a birdwatcher and walker I have enjoyed visits, and hillside meals as I said, there before. I wish that more often when I went camping some guy in attractive attire would walk over covered in balloons. Of course, other stuff regularly happens. Rural life is, I suggest, more anomalous, more given to particularity than the sometimes less-forgiving concrete jungle. OK, there are codes, conventions (in Totnes, Devon, England, to be a local, the post office woman once told me, you have to live there for thirty years...only?), but it is more free-wheeling. This may be the case, and I am sure there are lots of other sociological reasons for it, if only because the police are further away (there is no police station on Rathlin Island), and the elements are closer at hand.
Our times, and surely others, are marked by an expansionist ethos. If something is good, make it better; if it works do it again, and more of it. This mindset - which clearly is fed by the aggressive economic system that gave rise to industrialisation, colonialism and globalisation - is also in evidence in the field of art. Every time I read that an art event - say one of the biennials, still multiplying like bunnies3 - plans to be the best or the biggest, it prompts a laugh.
In an age of superlatives, where the vocabulary, or veneer we should call it, of our various leaders in various fields promises so much, simple juxtapositions open up a wonderful space of the imagination.4 This project wasn't an all-seeing, all-doing monkey. It was a group of people who gave themselves over, as passers-by were undoubtedly doing, in relation to the performances or not - to engaging with landscape, architecture, materials, social phenomena, and so on. They brought their passions, humour and acuity, things you can chance upon at any bus stop for sure, but which here took the form of a group of artists who set about making actions, where they aren't always expected, where from some points of view, they don't belong. Things not staying where they belong is a good thing, I think.
In a culture of auditing, which is generally part of a surveillance climate, things slip through the monitoring. They are not made to be monitored, to be counted, with a glimpsometer. Whilst bearing the BBeyond mark on the flyer, the work is de-territorialised, it comes and goes and is not part of some bigger scheme. To use an analogy, it is like punctuation: from the grammar of your ambitions you can design your own snare, that closes round that once-freer-running thing. So, as well as filling gaps, the BBeyond artists on this occasion made new, interesting holes, digging beneath the surfaces of street life, making views and geographies porous. Nothing whole, just fragmentary, both elusive and discursive.
Julie Bacon is an artist, researcher and writer, who is currently based in Belfast.
In Place of Passing, a Bbeyond project, supported by Interface, Belfast, various locations in Northern Ireland 17 - 22 June 2005
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