At 26 Caledonian Road, N1 London,
there was once a deli. There will be a deli again. In the meantime, there is
space to be inhabited. Abandoned, to be reclaimed, a vessel for dreams, projections
and plans of MAKING A HOME.
What makes a house a home? How
can we identify ourselves in a space which is not our own, only a temporary
roof, yet so full of what we used to be?
A group of artists, curated by
Tatiana Delaunay and myself, took over Geddes Gallery with their own notions of
the passage of time, formations of memory, and the trauma of renting on
November 20th, 2015. We were questioning the relationship between a space
and its inhabitants in the urban context, and more particularly in London
metropolis, constantly changing.
For this exhibition, I created a
choreographic/ performative piece called ‘instructions for the
uninitiated performer in the intent of making a home’. It was
inspired by the Happening instructions developed in the Fluxus movement of the
1960s, for example by Wolf Vostell or Allan Kaprow, and by Charlotte
Spencer’s ‘Walking Stories’ and the
exercise we devised on the Next Choreography programme in
response to her piece (see Maria’s post below!)
Throughout the
day, we gave out sheets of paper with these ‘instructions’ to the visitors of
the gallery; it was intended to inspire them to go on a treasure hunt of sorts,
look in places and corners of the rooms that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and
discover new ideas about what it means to feel ‘at home’ in a space.
The Geddes gallery isn’t really a
gallery. Not in the White Cube sense, anyway. It is an old house on the corner
of Caledonian Road and Keystone Crescent, consisting of an eclectic collection
of rooms: There is the entrance area, what used to be the storefront, lined
with rows and rows of white shelves that formerly held an abundance of Italian
treats; the back rooms on the ground floor, grimy, dim and somehow
otherworldly, mainly used for storage in deli times; narrow, fragile
staircases; a kitchen space with once-white tiles which, for some unapparent
reason, has a shower crammed into one of its corners; two dilapidated bedrooms
with flowery wallpaper and rock hard beds.
When the shop owner retired after
more than 40 years last summer, an array of sculptures and other artwork was
found in the basement of 26 Caledonian Road – they belonged to artist Jim
Geddes, a neighbour who had asked for them to be kept there. It was then
decided that his art should be exhibited – and then curator Cornelia Marland
got in touch with the landlord to arrange a series of exhibitions that will
continue until March 2016, when the house will be renovated and become a deli
once more.
Currently, though, this peculiar
place, five minutes from busy and booming Kings Cross station, feels like a
time capsule; when stumbled upon, it is an entirely unexpected and charming
surprise.
With ‘instructions’ I wanted to recreate this sense of discovery and ambiguity
for our audience. Tying into that agenda, our artists created installations and
immersive spaces throughout the house, blurring the lines between fact and
fiction by making it unclear what had been found and left in the rooms and what
had been placed there by them. The instructions laid out for the visitor –
‘performers’ did not need to be followed step by step, or be taken literally at
all – this was entirely up to them to decide. Ultimately, some of our visitors
did spend many minutes going through every single of the suggested motions,
understanding them as prescriptive; others seemed to think it was just a nice
piece of writing, not for them to act upon; and then for some, it may have
sparked one or two new ideas and helped them connect to the building.
It is worth mentioning that we
also used ‘instructions’ as an input for improvisation when we devised the
performances, the so-called ‘acts of inhabiting’, that took place during the evening on November 20th.
Making this
piece was part of my current choreographic research: I am interested in daily
bodily habits and our ways of navigating familiar and unknown architectures; I
am experimenting with ways of documenting our quotidian ways of moving, for
example by tracing, drawing maps, or using strategies of intervening/
interrupting habitual movements. The question of what happens when
choreographer/ artist and audience enter into co-authorship of a piece is very
interesting to me as well.
