Index print

I've been reading about a Surrealist interest in 're-filing' ideas and objects according to the logic of the unconscious e.g The Office for Surrealist Research proposing creating a card file index of all the 'ideas that occurred to us concerning every question which will be raised by our entire group'.

It's an interesting idea that a collection of items could be called an archive while not being ordered in a rational manner.

I'm interested in developing a previous work - Kept Objects - which sought responses and chance connections with others, when I gave away some of the many belongings I collect around me without making active use of them.

I am interested in links made by early Surrealists like Andre Breton and Max Ernst between chance encounters and the unconscious. Breton described a 'found object' as an external answer to a question in your mind that you did not know you had asked.

I want to explore what my kept belongings mean to me, and what connections they could spark in others.

References:
Sven Spieker, The Big Archive (2008) MIT Press.
Previous work 'Kept Objects' shown at Arnolfini Live Art Weekender

Position Unpaid

Position Unpaid is a collaboration between Emma Leach & Natasha Vicars. The project asks awkward questions about arts internships, and moves towards some constructive answers.

A manifesto developed by arts interns within this project can be viewed at:
www.position-unpaid.blogspot.com

Initial action presented at RCA within Friends of the Divided Mind

The project was also featured in Labour Practices from the Live Art Development Agency as part of the wider show At Your Service from the David Roberts Art Foundation

LIKE WHEN YOU, Vyner Street

LIKE WHEN YOU is a two-week research project into the process of making artwork, using a collaborative studio space to generate ideas, artwork and discussion, lead by Tamarin Norwood.

I interviewed artists about the role of coincidence and accident in their practice, using the game pictured above to select from my pre-written questions by chance. One response from another artist is sampled below:

“I say I embrace chance as part of my practice – but I embrace it in a control-freakish way! It happens and then I take it into my power instead of letting it continue to be something that I can do nothing about. For example, I was doing a piece of performance work in a lecture theatre, and some one had drawn something on the white board and left a note saying ‘please leave’. So I thought, ‘oh, it’s going to have to be part of my performance now.’ So I put out a note saying: ‘Please contact me as soon as you see this, I need to have an interview with you’… I need to record it, I need to turn it into a transcript, I need to justify it in my sketch book, I need to reflect on why it was part of my performance… So already something that was – that I could have left to be - accidental and unexplained, had become rationalised within my process.”



LIKE WHEN YOU, what it is to make an artwork

Photo credit: Tamarin Norwood