CELUI QUI NE M'ACCOMPAGNAIT PAS
Burgoyne, Greig (2018) CELUI QUI NE M'ACCOMPAGNAIT PAS. [Drawing, Exhibition/show, Installation, Performance, Site-specific work, Sound art, Video]
- Online Video
- Audio/Video
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The capitalist notion of ‘flat time’ is a schematic, routine and ordered time/space we are so familiar with, so much so we don’t even notice it.
This project asks if it is possible to evade this container for our perception, and experience a simultaneous time and space by the very act of paradoxically intensifying its logic.
More specifically, when we read are we aware of the words or is the story the key function of the book? When we think of words we immediately are controlled again by language, its logic and its imposed and learned meanings that come with it.
French theorist De Certeau in his book ‘The practice of everyday life’ spoke of walking as a metaphor of writing, where we write a text but are unable to read it as we don’t stop and turn around…
In addition, Wittgenstein said that the limits of our language are the limits of our world… are limits always about expanding in quantity when the quality of that experience of language make be more enriching and memorable.
The resulting project is three works, each directly and indirectly combining walking without preplanning where we are going, alongside an experience of sound derived from editing books.
Each work arrived at through a process led rule based system where play and speculation have been key factors. Books have systems of ordering space and time, pages and content, as does language, through spending an intensive and focused period of time within the library, Burgoyne has applied an alternate system that collection that both opens up that order and liberates the words as a result.
The first of three works that make this project is a wall text work in vinyl, that is the result of combining the first line of the in the first book and last line, on the last page of the last book from each subject area in the entire library collection. When placed in a grid matrix an ordered disorder that is less words but more sounds-phonics. As opposed to visualising as we often do when reading, Burgoyne seeks to draw our attention to the pure sounds before they become words and stories. In this way the wall work is a a drawing of sound as letters.
Combined with the respective page numbers these lines occurred on, when transcribed to footsteps to walk, become the live performance to be given on the opening night of the show, where Burgoyne utters the sounds of the books, while walking both in and outside the library space as the footsteps walked orientate that journey that results. You are invited to follow him as he walks. In this he seeks to release words from order and containment and liberate them in space and time.
The conclusion of this event is a sound recording to listen to while walking in and around the library oneself. The recording combines the spoken sounds of the wall text, and a recorded walk taking in the circumference of the town itself, textures, sound and space meet a parallel space of sounds uttered and dispersed, as a mobile sense of space as breath. The recording can be listened to, on the various headsets placed in and around the library site.
The project is complimented by a series of incidental works, that explore the notion of the site being outside ones immediate sense of time and space.
These actions result in modest works made of A4 paper and brown tape such as 'bookworm' indicative of the measurement of unrolling tape and re rolling in relation to walking the library space. These extend to the residual elements such as the bank card used to rub the vinyl onto the wall, that appear book-like at its demise.
Finally, situated in the large cabinet as one enters the Médiathèque, is a series of digital prints representing the empty spaces between books. Images of empty shelves on paradoxically empty shelves. Filling an empty spaces with images Burgoyne sees as materially physical- yet potentially devoid or liberated of content.
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