performance in collaboration with Christophe and Egon Charles
"Bend++"; Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts; Machida, Japan. 2005
Composer Christophe Charles and his seven year old son, Egon, sit at a table lined with several stones, a tree branch, a few metal plates, and a jar of water. Contact microphones are attached to these objects, and hooked up to Christophe’s laptop. The venetian blinds behind them are slowly raised to reveal a glass wall, beyond which a pond and the park outside the museum can be seen.
I stand on a rock in the pond, several meters away, looking back the audience. I hold in my hands a clear vinyl umbrella with a 2-meter long "skirt" (of the same material) cascading down from edges of the umbrella: a belljar-like form.
Inside with the audience, Egon manipulates the objects on the table, while Christophe processes the material sounds in real time. Lowering myself into a kneeling position causes the skirt of my umbrella to dip below the water’s surface. This results in the belljar becoming so completely airtight that it holds itself up (supports its own weight). I light several tall white candles on the rock, and then make no further movements.
Inside, the sound of natural respiration can be heard mingling with flowing liquid as Egon pours water from one jar into another. As the oxygen in the belljar gradually depleted, candle flames grew smaller. Steam began also fog up the inside of the belljar, rising from the water’s surface. As evening fell, the fog rose inside the belljar and the candles began to flicker out one by one. When the last flame extinguished itself, the venetian blinds were lowered, and the sounds faded to silence.
photos by: Juergen Specht
durational performance: 5 hours
"8th International Art Action Festival: Interakcje"; Restauracja Europa, Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland. 2006
A hermetic seal in created in the pitch dark underside of a staircase, with a plastic sheet covering the entrance of the space.
I am surrounded by 400 candles, which I light one by one. The space slowly becomes brighter as the number of flames grow.
However, after about 20 minutes (and many candles yet to be lit), the oxygen level in the space is no longer able to sustain the flames, and they begin to extinguish themselves.
photos by: Mariusz Marchewicz