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and you really move, 2021
private participatory one-to-one performance, cotton dyed with black beans, painted wood, digitally printed and dyed lycra, text, dyed cotton gloves

Masters Degree Exhibition
curated by Katia Krupenokova and Kris Dittel
Academie Gallery, Utrecht, July 2021



Each day, following the close of the exhibition, one participant was invited to join in a shared reading of the printed text. Each of these participatory performances/exchanges took place privately, without viewers, cameras or witnesses, allowing the participant an more comfortable and intimate interaction with the artist and the text.
Written in the form of a mobius strip, this text is composed of a series of short phrases or sentnences, with no begininng or end. As it is read, the text is pulled by the participant and the artist, circulating through the performance structure. Both voices speak aloud and as a result of the different pace of both readers, and between each performance the order in which these phrases are said is in constant flux. As a result the meaning is constucted differently upon each seperate reading. The work uses the physical actions of pulling, circulation and reading aloud together to examine the social nature of texts, and emphasise how meaning within a text is changed greately by how we relate to it, and to those we have in mind as we read.


By day, the text lies waiting. It is quiet and unmoving.

But by evening, the text is spoken and comes to life in the presence of the voices and hands that take it up and move it, beginning a process of circulation.

In conversation, we are always passing parts of ourselves back and forth. Where one of us ends and the other begins is blurry.



You and I read together, and as we do, we set words flowing.

Words are messy moving things, and the voice brings the body with it as it goes. Our languages contain a physicality that takes up space and crosses from body to body.

You and I address ourselves, we address each other, we address all that moves through the air between us.



You and I make meaning together by endlessly restating and reordering what passes through our hands.

You and I make meaning together by talking and sharing and transforming.

You and I make meaning together, slowly, over time.
Mark
Running on Cargo