- Venue
- Various venues
- Location
- South East England
As this review is written, after sixteen days of film, performance, talks and events, the fifth Whitstable Biennale ends. For those of you who did not make it during this brief window of opportunity, this and other accounts will mediate your view. How will these individual takes on the event accumulate and construct this landscape again in a different form? If you are able to wade through all the talk of pearls and oysters, you will catch glimpses of the work, which did not remind us once again what Whitstable is famous for. But instead gradually revealed spaces, and spaces within spaces, as they journied through factories, archives and dreams.
This Biennale, as with previous incarnations, featured an array of live work. Meaning that any singular visit amounts to a conspicuously partial view. However, rather that narrate a personal fragment, this account will focus on certain constant features of the Biennale, three videos that looped again and again, for different audiences across the sixteen days. With each repetition, voices are present to guide us as we feel our way through unfamiliar spaces and narratives.
The Voyage of Nonsuch is the final act of a trilogy of works by Ruth Beale and Karen Mirza across two Whitstable Biennales (2008/10). Within this video, the camera passes through the stacked shelves of the British Film Institute Archive, as a voiceover meanders through maritime history and frames the archive as a ‘space, site and meta-structure’. This film essay, composed largely of citations, analyses the authoritative nature of the voice within archival material, and the role this has in influencing, and even constructing our understanding of particular social histories. How the artists, and subsequently the viewer, navigate this material is literally re-enacted in a voice coaching class. In stark contrast to the empty passages of the archive that the camera glides through, this oddly theatrical scene reveals participants acting out a play on the word navigation.
This sense of acting out continues in a more open-ended fashion in a scenario initiated by Olivia Plender and Unnar Örn. Table Read involves a large group of people brought together to undertake a ‘script read through’. This ‘script’ sourced from two months that the artists spent exchanging their dreams in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, comprises remembered thoughts and emotions that touch on ‘democracy, power, social hierarchies and the narration of history’. Rather than a historical archive, these narratives are pulled from a different form of repository: some dream state, using fragments of this absurd or irrational thought as the seeds from which to develop scenes from/for a play. However, rather than simply documenting the process undertaken to reach a final play, this workshopping exercise provides a framework for a performance to occur. A storytelling, where fragments of dreams are interpreted, extrapolated and expanded upon live within the work, as participants question the motivations of the protagonists they take on and alternate approaches play out in front of us.
Whilst The Voyage of Nonsuch and Table Read were situated in the municipal architecture of the Museum and the Library respectively, and could be accessed at any point within the loop, Phil Coy’s Façade occupied a corrugated steel container on the side of the harbour and our access was strictly limited to once an hour. Supposedly taking ‘audiences on a journey through contemporary glass architecture’, this description does not adequately prepare you for the circuit the video performs, but as a work that uses artifice to disrupt its own architectural and linguistic structure, perhaps this is the initial deception. Stepping inside the steel box, the door clangs shuts and you are confined to the interior, insulated from the bustling exterior of the harbour. Archival footage from glass factories quickly gives way to contemporary glass architecture, the camera panning over reflective surfaces and passing through a sequence of transitional spaces. Rotating doors and lifts lead from one hermetically sealed space to the next, always with the promise of an exterior, visible through the glass but never accessible.
The role of the voice is striking, providing a framework to engage with each of these three works; with Façade this involves listening to a fragmented and looping narration delivered by TV news anchor Julia Somerville. Her voice framing this glass architecture as some form of therapeutic and normative space, structuring behaviour and disciplining transgressive acts. People contained within, she states, will be let out when they are ready to engage properly in social and economic life. This narrative stutters and the image flickers, revealing actors and equipment isolated in a green screen set-up. The receding glass and steel that we were told contained and even cured, is instead a projection, a composite or a trick.
These different voices not only guide us as we stumble through unfamiliar spaces and narratives, they also have the potential to mislead or trip us up. This is not to say that the works are simple tricks, revealing how much our understanding is constructed, but instead they are a ploy, allowing us to consider our engagement with these simultaneous layers of narrative, and engage our imagination to contribute to a more nuanced view of the spaces and landscape that we journey through.
