It is taking time for us to work out how to work. I have no experience to compare this residency with however Sorcha said that this is like no other residency that she has been on, and she has been on several in the last two years. After a very slow morning we were tasked with identifying two outdoor spaces for installations – one large, and one small. Four of us headed out towards a large abandoned building probably less than one hundred meters from where we are staying. This particular building is simply a concrete shell, a four floor concrete shell pierced with large square windows in a strict regular grid pattern across the fasade.
Several rooms on the ground floor had curious features: two step-like blocks cast directly on/in the concrete, not far from that a pit with one sloping side. Another room bore traces that hinted that a row of four toilet stalls had been removed but perhaps the holes on the floor were something else. In one room brown paint flaked from the walls and ceiling in almost leaf-like forms. We climbed a staircase to the top floor. There was much more, and much better, grafitti on this floor. We walked the length of the building to the ’double return’ staircase near to the battered and rusted steel door where we had entered. No of stood too close to edge where it dropped to the floor below. We talked about fears of heights, fears of falling, fears of jumping. I experienced that curious tingling sensation in my groin that I always get when I approach a precipice. Walking down the stairs I realised that the fall from the floor above was of course only one floor, somehow standing on the top floor it felt as though I might fall through the whole building, all four floors, were I too fall. Was this a space for an installation?
The exercises that we are given raise questions that I cannot answer – at least I cannot answer them for the time being. I simply do not know what kind of installation space I am, or the group is, looking for. And at the moment I/we do not know how I/we will know what kind of space I/we are looking for. I could certainly imagine making something in (some of) the window apertures in the building’s fasade … but that would be my work work rather than a collaborative piece.
What is collaborative process? And how can it make work that exceeds the individual?
