Here’s a photo from the Family Day workshop back in April, with explanatory video below..
The Chisenhale press release outlines Kerbel’s work KILL THE WORKERS like this:
“Following the conventions and mechanics of stage lighting and dramatic genres and forms, Kerbel has written a cue script for lights in the vein of a mythic odyssey. Desiring to be seen as light itself, rather than as light serving to illuminate form, a single ‘spotlight’ becomes the key protagonist on an epic journey of conflict and transformation to become one with the ‘worker’ lights, and to realise his dream of ‘open white’.”
I wanted the children to use pens as protagonists – ‘as pens themselves’ – rather than as pens ‘serving to illuminate form’. Rather than making the pens write and draw whatever we human beings want them to, the children decorated and dressed the pens as people and monsters and animals, and had them dance on paper stages. I’ve kept all the dances, rolled up in a tube by my tableleg. Some of the dances were fights, one was a football match, a couple were friendly conversations. You can just about make out which is which if you study the scribbles.
In all this I’m interested in the tension between the material form of the light and its functional role as an illumination of other material forms. It’s a tension that comes up in my own work in terms of the dual material and referential qualities of language, and keeping the dances rolled up on the floor is something I want to think more about.
Speaking of which, I still have the wire from the London Word Festival scrunched up elsewhere on my floor. The wire scrunches are left over from the conversations Alex and I had in British Sign Language and sculpture: the time and gestures of speaking made material and kept in a corner getting dusty.
