Live Dining, Nicole Fournier

Live Dining (second event) Nicole Fournier Video Still: Tagny Duff

Live Dining is a two-part performance facilitated by Nicole Fournier inviting participants to create polyculture ecosystems in the city. Polycultural agricultural systems, which feature diverse types of plants and ecosystems, have become a rarity within the rapid growth of monoculture systems that yield larger crops returns. Live Dining raises issues around the growing presence of mono-agriculture production, a mode of food production conducted in rural areas and urban sprawl that can have devastating impact on the balance of the natural environmental habitat. (This has been noted as one potential causes of the disappearance of honey bees and is discussed further in Lori Weidenhammer's work). In this work, Fournier, gallery staff, festival artists and participants work together to both harvest natural food sources in the city and create a polycultural agriculture system with both cultivated and wild plants. In both works, the ritualistic practice of eating food is performed.

The first Live Dining event takes place in a parking lot. We meet at the gallery and pick up various objects –like chairs, eating utensils, and cultivated plants for seeding. Then we walk in a procession to the parking lot a few blocks away. Nicole instructs us where to set up the table, chairs and planters. Then she shows us the different kinds of eatable plants in the parking lot, which we begin to harvest. Soon we have a pile of green eatable “weeds” on the table. Nicole invites us too cut, chop and cook the various plants and food items from the natural and cultivated plants on an electric stovetop.

We occupy the parking lot (a private space) while we cook and eat. As part of the ritual of dining we also drink wine- another illegal form of conduct. A police officer drives up to the group and asks, “what is going on”? Juliana tells him that this is part of an art festival and invites him to join us for dinner. Many of us strike up a conversation with the police officer for about 20 minutes and we talk about the current housing crisis in Edmonton—which he says is media hype. The cop soon realizes that we are not trouble, asks us to stop drinking and then drives away. We keep eating (and drinking) until everyone is full and then return to the gallery.

The second action conducted for Live Dining takes place in a vacant grassy lot located in residential neighborhood. When we arrive at the site, Nicole is there planting corn and squash according to an early Mayan polyculture design. We all help dig and plant the garden. People driving in cars and walking by stop and ask us what we doing. When we tell them we are planting a garden, they seem fine with it- even though this is obviously not our property. Nicole forages for Burdock which grows in abundance on the lot while some of us start cutting food for dinner. Again, we have set up the dining room with the electric stove to cook vegetables.


Live Dining (second event), Nicole Fournier Video Still: Tagny Duff


Both these actions conducted as part of Live Dining speak to and create sustainable agricultural practices in the urban landscape. The piece enacts guerrilla gardening and utilizes an interventionist strategy employing direct action to create green spaces and food sources in unexpected and often illegal spaces in the city. These kind of guerrilla actions seek to generate and sustain polyculture ecosystems in areas that have been neglected or perhaps mis, or under used.


Live Dining (second event) Nicole Fournier Video Still Tagny Duff

As with other guerrilla gardening innitiatives Live Dining employs a grassroots community sensibility. The gallery staff has laboured to find suitable spaces for the events, and gather the plants, materials and items needed for the event. The festival artists have harvested, planted, cut and cooked the food. The staff at Latitude and another local artist, Lance, has offered to watch the garden over time after Nicole leaves. In order to generate Live Dining and the polyculture systems it creates and comments upon, the social network system used to deploy the piece becomes an extension of the “performance”. In other words, the event of foraging, cooking and eating—is as important as the relations created in the planning and actualization of the work.

In the art context, the enactment of guerrilla gardening references earlier land art movements and, in this case, earlier Fluxus works that often employed the ritual of eating and food. All these works explicitly use collaborative working networks in order to create the work. However, the collaborative frame of this kind of community based artwork is not always fully rendered in art practices today. Conventions around accreditation that demand noting authorship (often single) often continue to be perpetuated in the context of performance art. This pretense can impede the intention of a work—particularly works that are not meant to be performances by one artists, but in fact, is created through many facilitators/enablers and participants. This is important to note. Live Dining raises questions about the role of multiple participants and their own sense of accountability to not just the “art” but to the practice of eating in everyday life.

As we know, the concept of sustainability is fore grounded in many contemporary debates regarding the state of the global environment. The Kyoto Accord emphasized the need to reduce green house emissions by 55 % from the developing countries years ago. The accord was drafted in 1997 and just started being reinforced in 2005. Many of the goals of the accord are not being met. Perhaps guerrilla gardening in inner cities is one way to prompt immediate, albeit small change to the environmental practices in cities. Nicole’s Live Dining is an attempt to bring these ideas to light though aesthetics of care- one that seeks to foster life systems. The shift in the way such environmental conscious practices are enacted also calls for a rethinking of systems of artistic collaboration and the value placed on such relations.

Sara Wookey, Walking Edmonton

Sara Wookey, Walking Edmonton


Sara Wookey’s walking performances prompt encounters with the city as a form of memory. For two days she invites people to enact a walk through the city. However, it is not necessarily the walk that is the arena of this “performance”. It is in the informal conversations with walkers after their trip that facilitate a performance in and through retrospect. The remembering and telling of events becomes exaggerated and personalized through informal exchange of memoirs. The city, in this case becomes one of memory constructed through future recollections of past experiences.

I start at the gallery. On the reception desk there is a sign that gives me an option to choose one of two papers that are folded and stapled. I choose the one that says “Directed Tour”. It invites me to take a 45 minute walk through the city. The directions tell me to walk continuously and if I reach a red crosswalk light, to cross the other side. So I leave the gallery and the tour begins.

I wander out of the gallery and walk towards Jasper Street. I relax. I have time. I give myself over to the directive constraints of walking for 45 minutes. This is strangely comforting. For the last week I haven’t had the time to wander the city. Now I relax and feel the sun on my skin and hear the conversations from people I pass by. I find myself stumbling upon the river shortly after walking through the downtown core. I walk up and down a steep set of stairs and feel my heart rate race. My mind wanders and I forget that I partaking in “a performance”. When I get back to the gallery, I realize that I have not followed the directions since I often stopped at stoplights. I think about it some more and realize that standing still is to be in motion, so perhaps I haven’t unwittingly corrupted the directions.


Walking Edmonton, Sara Wookey
Video by Tagny Duff

During the walk I hold my video camera and put it on 6 second interval record. I am not sure if I will even use the footage. I forget about the camera. When I look at it later I find it amusing that it evidences my stillness while waiting for the street lights to turn green. The pixellated quicktime video creates a different sense of rhythm than the one I experienced on the walk.

When I return, I enter back through the gallery. Sara has set up a map of Edmonton with an index of different coloured pins, each corresponding to particular signification. An orange pin connotes when something memorable occurred. A red one is noted as referencing “where you felt desire”, and a white one marks when you stopped performing the walk. People have indexed their experiences according to these markers and pinned them on the map to correlate where “it” happended. Participants have also hand written thoughts, drawings and notes based on their responses to walks onto the wall of the gallery.

My immediate response was to resist the placing of my experiences on the map. Why qualify, archive and index my sensations on a grid? For some time, that I cannot fully remember, I was off the grid. Drifting. I wandered. I was walking in the city following constraints facilitated by the artist. However, other events and sensations occurred outside of those parameters. I thought about my mother, wondered if my visa payment had gone through yet, enjoyed the sunny warm weather, watched as two people walked slowly down the long steps to the river while complaining about low back pain, and noticed a man sleeping on the bench at the river lookout point.

I meet with Sara at a coffee shop and we continue to talk about my experiences and thoughts about the walk. She tells me that she has been conducting informal follow up discussions with most of the walkers/participants. Similar to our talk, the other conversations she has had tend to be casual and informal. Stories are told and exchanged. This is as much a part of the walk, it seems, as the walk itself. The remembering of the walk becomes the dislocated site of “the performance”. The ritualistic exchange of conversation between strangers and acquaintances becomes, not only the performance, but also the performance of art histories. Oral tradition and the telling of events as one remembers them is often a means of reproducing and creating memory of performance. The construction of personal histories becomes another critical dimension of this work. The impossibility of recording events as we might think they happened and to qualify them as facts is exposed in these dialogues. This oral memory is a kind of nomadic archive that cannot be inserted into horizontal and vertical measurements outlined on a predetermined grid.

Evening of "emerging" artists' performance work

Last night we attended an evening of performance by emerging and not-so emerging artists. ( I wonder at the need to qualify artists in terms of “emerging”, “mid-career” and “ established”--- classification models usually employed by funders).

It is Gabriela Rosende’s first performance and for Jason Chinn and Katherine Krampol it is an opportunity to show and develop some new material. Then there are Julianna and Todd who have been practicing performance for years. Julianna wraps the audience up in a 250 square foot radius floorspace with rope and equates this cramped space to the allotment of living space for alternative low-income housing currently being designed in Vancouver, Tokyo and other cities at the moment. Todd Janes declares that his performance is influenced by all of us and is a personal thank you to all the artists. He eats strawberries and weeds (from Nicole’s and Irene’s performances), uses chalk from Emma’s performance, posts notes on a clothesline (reminiscent of Sara’s archive across the hall), and performs other references to his own experience as curator and artist within the context of living in Edmonton. I was particularly affected when he spoke about how the sound of a thunderstorm and rain on the prairies frightened him, as he poured baking soda over his body, and then vinegar. The chemical reaction between the soda and vinegar created a bubbling and crackling sound as the vinegar ran down his body and dropped to the floor to the sound of intense rain.

The festival is over tomorrow and so this event marks the impending end of our time in Edmonton. It is a small, personal and intimate crowd—mostly the artists from the festival, Latitude staff and board members and the gallery crowd. These kinds of gatherings- a staple in many artist-run and parallel centres in Canada and abroad- still have a grassroots ethic that encourages artists to develop ideas and work within a community of peers. This is a necessary forum for developing art practices and fostering cross-dialogue with other artists, interested publics and arts supporters. It remains me that artists are a public audience too. So often this fact is overlooked.

Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression in Listening.

Marc Couroux and Juliana Pivato, Video: Couroux and Pivato
The Fetish Character of Music and The Regression in Listening.


The sound ecology of each cityscape is littered with prerecorded and live ambient sound. The continuous presence of these frequencies is filtered out through selective attention, and often goes unnoticed. Often the visual is privileged as the sense of navigation, and the aural is disregarded as background or unnecessary excess information. However, the aural dimension of urban life has the potential to move bodies through spaces. For example, muzak, original and remixed versions of popular music, is a staple of urban centres. It bleeds from shop windows and mall entranceways. The constant spillage of ambient music harmonizes with the sounds of mall shoppers and street sounds. Muzak is slyly insinuated into corporate spaces to lubricate the movement of bodies. Pedestrians are soothed into contemplative window-shopping. The steady drone of muzak is intended to deter street loiterers from hanging out. It plays in the background and blends into the sounds of cars driving by, of people conversing.

Juliana and Marc roam around the downtown core in a “performance- van” – a nomadic studio- where they repurpose muzak for passersby. Curtains are strung up around the windows of the van to hide the process of production. The visual effect renders the van as a kind of inaccessible shelter. Marc and Juliana take 4 fragments, randomly generated by MAX (a computer program) from 40 Carpenters’ songs, and attempt to “smooth them out”. Marc works on the keyboard and Juliana sits with headphones and a mic that is amplified. The speakers blast the live remix of the fragmented music emitting a lyrical form of music-muzak out from the van window. This blends with the sounds and muzak that circulate around the outer parameters of urban centres, like The Bay Department Store, Shoppers Drug Mart and other such places.

In order to locate the nomadic van, Marc and Juliana have set up maps of locations and times accessible through their blog. People are invited to find the van and encounter the soundscape Marc and Juliana create. Sometimes they are found, other-times not. Like many other works in the festival, this piece is not intended for an invited audience.

The visual cue of the curtains in the van attracts more attention than the loud oddly repetitive muzak. I find it after wandering around for twenty minutes. I hear the loud sound of the Carpenters’ music and see the van across the street from The Shoppers Drug Mart on 102nd Street. At first glance, it appears as though someone is camping out in their car and listening to a cd that is skipping. Some people stop to see if there is anyone in the van. They might see Marc playing the keyboard through a crack in the curtain. Most people just walk by. The subtle articulation of the sound performance is barely perceptible. Like Emma Howes’ performance, Marc and Juliana also seek to de-emphasize the proscenium and the traditional staging of the performance of music, in order to amplify its trace. In the attempt to de-emphasize the staging, another staging occurs. In the context of Edmonton’s current media focus on the tent squats and growing issue of homelessness due to rising housing costs, the van becomes a display of nomadic shelter. This is further evidenced by the fact that they rent parking space for hours at a time in order to both rehearse and generate muzak for incidental audiences.


When I walk towards the van I am taken by the way the motion and speed of my walking gait is implicated in the growing amplitude of the sounds emitted from the van. My motion determines the volume of Juliana’s singing voice. As I walk past the van, the level increases. The frequencies are reverberated against the cement enclave of the City Centre façade. If I didn’t know that the van was part of the performance, then I might think that the music was coming from a speaker on the building. I look up to the cement ceiling overhangs and search for outdoor speakers, and find none. I sit on a ledge just across from the van and listen. A sentence is repeated over and over. This is not the conventional melodic repetition of chorus lines forming the structure of a popular song. This original and live remix of oddly familiar lyrics and melody is as soothing as it is irritating. I close my eyes and listen for rhythm in the glitch. I discern the sounds of the cars passing by from the flow of this madly repetitive phrasing. I try to discern the music from the ambient- as figure and ground, and realize that this muzak is embedded in the ambient environment. Rhythms that Marc and Juliana create play with the rhythms of the continuous flow of motion in the streets. These are not “dotted rhythms” as Juliana explains in one of her postings on their blog. There is difference created in this repetition. The phrase takes on another form through each re-articulation.

They are not performing for the audience, but inserting an expanding field of unexpected encounter with the frequencies we travel through everyday, perceptible and imperceptible as sound or noise. They don’t want to perform for people, or have people encounter the work as performance. Rather it is the body moving through the aural field and moving the aural field that is the performance. As each body encounters this differently, it becomes impossible to locate the “place” of this performance.

The work illuminates a substrate of time-space that we move through and create in the city, that is rarely consider as a site of performance. Often we think of site-specific work as having to take place in a space or place, at a certain time. The definition of site connotes “a location”. But in this case, I encounter an auralscape that seeps through the parameters of the the visual markers of place. When the van is no longer in my field of vision, the soundscape Marc and Juliana create becomes ubiquitous with ambient sounds of the city. I cannot locate the “place” of this aural encounter on an X/Y axis, even though they created a map to direct me to this area.

Thoughts on Documentation

The morning meetings held every other day throughout the festival focus on the problem of documenting. This is a key concern in the festival given the fact that most works are nomadic and do not lend themselves to the same aesthetic preoccupations as staged performance. In the discussions many of the artists voice a desire not to index the events in a moment in time or as evidence of “what happened”.

Often documentation of performance art (or live art) is recorded with video or photography in order to record the so-called original and authentic moment of a performance. Documentation has often been used to legitimize and historicize performance art and function as evidence of activity to funders. The obsessive and excessive presence of video in performance events has now become normalized. The presence of a videographer lurking in the background of performance works, or audience members using camcorders have become conventional props augmenting the performance event.

Our discussions focus on how this performative presence of a documenter (videographer or witness) might be employed in the works of the festival. I ask each artist how I can engage as an audience member and documenter in each of their works. I ask, might it be more advantageous to include documenters in the creative process of the work rather than after the fact, (as is so often the case of performance art festivals). We talk about the process of documentation as being integral to the development and production of some of the works.

As noted in the previous post, the Visualeyez blog is the site of documentation and reflection for a durational audience. By this I mean that audiences will experience the blog through various lenses of time, (Ie. As a current blog and as an archive). The blog extends the potential experiential dimension of the events through time in a very different way than the accidental encounters with the nomadic performance do. Playing with diverse strategies to encounter the audience and for the audience to encounter the creative impulse of the works, many of the artists have created parasitic blogs that reflect on their own processes of creation throughout the festival. (See the links).

Drinking In The Kitchen, Irene Loughlin

Irene Loughlin, Drinking in the Kitchen Video still: Tagny Duff

We enter into the kitchen of Latitude 53 and find a place to sit on the floor. Irene Loughlin stands behind the table and grabs a bottle of dark scotch whisky. She proceeds to take copious amounts of drink from the bottle. Then she sits down next to the kitchen table. Slowly she sinks into the chair and lays her upper torso across the table.

This is a semiotics of the kitchen – of sorts.

However, it is not the same kind of Semiotics of the Kitchen performed by Martha Rosler on video in 1975. Whereas Rosler performs (while deconstructing) the engendering of gender in language through kitchen objects, Loughlin performs the excess of the sign experienced in the throws of drunkenness. She makes martinis and margaritas to the rhythm of Rosler’s video which plays as a loop on a VHS monitor placed on the kitchen table. The two performances collide and converse. At moments, Rosler’s articulation of “fork” and motions to jab the air is juxtaposed to Irene’s chopping of lemons with a butcher knife. The audience laughs at Rosler’s exaggerated mocking gesture and simultaneously grimaces nervously at Irene’s vigorous cutting motions. The collision between Rosler’s and Loughlin’s actions produce slippage and breakdown of language. I feel it. So does the audience as Irene serves us martinis and margaritas for the hour long performance.

I watch as Irene stumbles around the kitchen. The ice dispenser on the fridge is stuck. So she walks back to the sink and grabs some ice from the bag. She proceeds to put the ice and vodka in a martini shaker and shakes vigorously. Then she pulls at the lid to open it. But it’s stuck. She tries everything to open it. It won’t open. Members from the audience offer to help. They can’t open it either. Finally Todd leaves the gallery with the shaker and comes back with it opened. Irene proceeds to make martinis and adorns them with olives and lemons. She walks around the table and hands them to people who gratefully accept them.

She pours the ice into a blender and fumbles to switch it on. The smell of burning quickly fills the kitchen. Someone from the audience suggests she put some alcohol in the blender. It needs liquid, otherwise it might burn up the motor. She pours too much vermouth in. Everyone groans. The pouring and mixing of the margaritas continues to intermix with the rhythm of Rosler’s voice “ ladle”, “knife” and “apron”. I am offered a margarita and begin to drink it, even though I am video taping.

The laughter amplifies and gets increasingly louder through the hour of drinking and watching Irene make the drinks. We are complicit and participate in her drunken, clumsy stupor. This kind of social drinking is acceptable. No-one in the room turns the offer for a drink down. The drinks are too strong—too much vermouth and vodka—mixed with strange, horrific garnishes like cucumber, creamcheese, donuts and lemon.

When all the liquor is gone, Irene stops her work. She takes a quick swig of the bottle. Before it disappears, a slight foam appears in the bottle. I realize that it is coke in the bottle. Irene is performing her drunkenness. Everyone in the room, on the other hand, is noticeably intoxicated.

Irene grabs a gun.

There is more laughing. We follow Irene out of the kitchen to the street. She walks in her high heels and apron, with determination ahead of the crowd of people following her. As we walk past a bar, one guy sees us and says, “If you were a native and carrying a gun, the cops would be here in two seconds”.


Irene Loughlin, Drinking in the Kitchen
Video Still: Tagny Duff

We reach a parking lot. Todd, Juliana and other people set up a shooting range against the brick wall of a building. Irene watches intently as 12 cans of beer are shaken and stacked on top of each other. The beer cans tumble, and have to be reset. We wait.

I hear the sound of cop sirens. They grow louder. I look at Irene standing in the parking lot holding the gun, and notice the nervousness in the crowd. The sirens get louder. I wonder what will happen when the cops come. Who will the take the fall for possession of a firearm- Irene or the gallery? What about the public drunkenness and consumption of alcohol? Will the cops let it slid because we are participating in art, which is often the case? I wonder at the complicity we engage in. No-one interferes with Irene’s excessive alcohol consumption. No-one in the audience or on the street stops Irene from walking down the sidewalk with a gun. Unlike pedestrians in the street, we, the invited audience, know this is a performance, and want it to “go well”.


Irene Loughlin, Drinking the Kitchen
Video Still: Tagny Duff

The sirens never arrive. Irene turns her attention to the beer cans and takes aim. She shoots. She’s a straight shooter. All the cans are marked off, and one by one geysers of beer fountain. The crowd is relieved. We clap.

Irene’s staging of drunkenness in the intimate space of Latitude’s kitchen and its spillage on the streets addresses the affects of private and socially legitimized forms of substance abuse. Loughlin reverses the audience-performer role, through the manipulative strategies often employed by social drinkers. “I will drink if you will”. “I will join you in a drink”. But the drink is more than a drink. In this case, the exchange drinking is in excess of its own signification of “alcoholism” or “addiction”.

To join in a drink is potentially as invigorating as it is dangerous. Like Irene, Brian Jungen also brought beer to an art audience in a recent piece Beer Cooler (2002) to “share” in a friendly exchange of “spirits”. The pretence of drinking as a form of friendship may simultaneously be read as a ritual of territorialization. Irene’s friendliness with the audience was similarly a strategic ploy. Getting the audience drunk shifted the terrain of the performance. The audience welcomed her generous gift. Yet her generosity of gift was given on false pretence, she was sober and intended the audience to experience the effects of intoxication. We followed along with her offer and directions. When she takes out a gun, we don’t doubt her motivations. We know that she will be firing the gun at some point because the program said so. But we don’t know how or when or even why, but we go along with it. We trust her, even as we walk down the street with an armed weapon, albeit only a pellet rifle.

Again, I think of the guy at the bar who stated that Native people would not be so invisible when carrying a gun. Irene knows this. The performance of shooting is a direct reference to Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s performance “Shooting the Indian Act” presented in Surrey, England. In this piece Yuxweluptun shoots a paper copy of the Indian Act to protest the ongoing effects of the legislation on Indigenous People. Irene, similarly shots at cans of beers to reject the gift of alcohol and the legacy of ritualized dependency and consumption of intoxications. Within this legacy, the intimate space of ones own kitchen has the potential to become a public shooting range fraught with undercurrents of violence. Casual exchanges between friends and strangers become suspect. Micro-exchanges of these gifts (bottles of wine) are to be received with some trepidation. The semiotics of Irene’s kitchen is overfull. They spill out of the bullet-ridden holes of language, urban dwellings and city streets.

Subtle Architectures, Emma Waultraud Howes

Emma Waltaud Howes "Subtle Architecture", May 19, 2007
photo by anonymous videographer

Today starts off with a number of performances dispersed throughout various downtown locations. Lori Weidenhammer begins early in the morning at the Strathcona Market, Amber Landgraff finds a spot for her piece in front of the American Apparel, Juliana Pivato and Marc Couroux park their roaming van by the Hudson’s Bay Department Store and Emma Howes begins her nomadic performance in various spots situated in the downtown core. There are so many events happening each day throughout the festival- too many for me to see at once – so I have decided to focus on writing about one work a day. In the morning I met with various artists at the gallery to set up times throughout the week to talk about the process of their work and how they see my role in the documentation of it. In the early afternoon, I spend time with Emma Howes in conversation and witness to her first series of performance actions.

Subtle Architectures: A Practice in Enabling Constraints is a new research project conceived by Emma Waltraud Howes. The project explores and investigates movement of the body within various constraints and structures in the cityscape. Using a yellow chalk, Emma wanders through the city drawing chalk lines on the pavement, and creates subtle gestural movements within them. When her movements become noticeable to people, she stops, leaves the site and then continues to walk on to another location. The point of the project, Emma explains to me when we speak about the work, is to engage with and move through the city as an anonymous body- a body that moves through zones of indescernibility. She intends to remix and recreate gestures of the body found in the urban landscape. In a sense, she is interested in exploring Spinoza’s age old question What can a body do? within the constraints of the city. Emma takes the question one step further to explore how a moving body become “a motion machine” where “the spleen spits at the liver, slosh through the kidneys, gurgles towards the bladder.” (1)

Emma’s project is deliberately imperceptible in its execution. It asks audiences to find what they cannot already perceive. So how does the audience engage in a work that has no obvious entry point- no declared or established point of view, no clear frame of reference? Emma’s conceptual premise explicitly raises these questions. The timeframe and place of performance is denied to the audience. There is no fixed and predetermined stage. Like many of the other artists in the festival, Emma’s nomadic performances cannot be assigned to a schedule- much to the exasperation of audience participants who want to see the performances, but can’t find them. Emma explains to me that it is her intention to challenge the performer-audience divide conventionally upheld in performance, - especially professional dance, a field she is well trained in. Emma proposes accidental encounters with unsuspecting audiences and pedestrians. The festival audience must work to both find and see the “performance”—and in many cases, will fail. But this constructed intentional failure challenges expectations of art presentation and notions of audience.

When I meet with Emma prior to her first performance, we discuss the problem of documenting the work, given the fact that it intentionally seeks to be imperceptible. I ask Emma how my presence and that of a video camera might be relevant to her performances. How might the remembering of her intentions and actions be best evoked? Might another form of media and lack thereof be more desirable? What are the parameters that she envisioned for future audiences accessing the work? Was there a future audience for this work? At what point does the work begin and end, from her perspective as an artist, and mine as a documenter? Knowing that the presence of cameras in a site-specific context (or any event for that matter) inevitably shifts the dynamics of the event itself, I explained to Emma, I want to be clear about how my involvement in the documentation process might impact the work. Emma and I decide, based on the premise of her concept, that it would impede the work if I take any visual documentation. We agree that I will follow her movements as a silent witness.

Emma begins by walking out of the gallery to the street below. I watch her from the patio and see her walk up to a street parking sign two floors below. With a piece of yellow chalk she draws a box around the post, and steps inside it. The chalk marks echo the centre street dividing lines and the parking lots. Emma’s makeshift “stage” is nomadic. She steps inside the lines and begins to move within them. The subtle gestures seem to move the space around her. The chalk lines become abstracts marks that extend beyond their intended function, to create an unexpected harmony with the horizon line of the street and the sky. Her gestural movements are odd. Her arms move vertically along the parking meter. Her legs bend and she sits. Then she stands. Watches. The legs bend slightly, and she collapses ever so slightly. The motion of falling turns to standing motion. The impact of the movement bleeds through the constraints of the “stage” creating a ripple affect. A car driving by, stops. The man inside says something to Emma that I cannot hear. Then drives away. Emma picks up her backpack and chalk, then crosses the yellow line, walks away.

I continue to follow Emma for the next hour as she repeats the drawing of chalk lines on the pavement and creates strange bodies in motion. After the second performance, Emma and I discuss the possibility of videotaping the event in order to experience a sense of the motion she is in the city. Given the public responses to the work, Emma decides that video taping the next few performances may be a worthwhile exercise. I agree to stay inconspicuous in the background, as I tape with my small camcorder.


Subtle Architectures, Emma Waultraud Howes Video: Tagny Duff and Emma Waultraud Howes


The process of witnessing and documenting these performances, in a sense, becomes a major component of the performances themselves. After the performances were done this afternoon, Emma and I revisit the video footage and speak about how the performances were both perceived and imperceptible to city dwellers in the different locations. I note that the video evokes a different sense of timing and rhythm than what I remember seeing during the performances. Emma’s comments, when seeing the video, that she didn’t realize that her movement was not as amplified as she had felt them to be. She also notes the responses from people and recalls the conversations she had with a number of concerned citizens, which at the time I could not hear. We decide that three of the video segments will be interesting viewed on You Tube. Emma decides to keep a log of her observations and additional video footage on the Subtle Architectures blog.

The negotiation process of documentation is often overlooked in performance art festivals and live art presentation. In this case, my involvement with Emma’s project impacted on the development of creative content and the reception of that content. The potential for documentation to be a creative component of performance work is current under realized. Documentation practices (i.e. video and photography) are often seen to be taken from a neutral observer perspective. But this is far from the reality. As documentation is collected and reconstructed, often by gallery documenters, volunteers and/or staff in the pre and postproduction stages- the conceptual constraints of a work are affected. Rather than produce documentation “after the fact”, it is useful in the context of relational art practices, to approach documentation in collaboration with the artist before the performance takes place in order to express the conceptual frame of work. In this sense, Emma’s project along with many of the other works in this festival, ask for such a new methodology and relation between documenters, audiences and her work.

(1) From Emma’s bio in SEE Magazine. May 17-23, 2007, pp 22