Ian Joyce
XING PI an installation and performance
As sun sets, a prison-like room I am allocated to, is aglow in growing darkness: pieces of tinsel paper, (I brought with me) scratched, folded and un-folded and a lamp – improvised from a water bottle – irradiates light in a rhythmic circulation which I accompany with an aural envelope of flute notes. As though on queue, a breeze lifts my red, bronze and silver foils, exposing the back lighting.
Are these windows, open to Xingpi ?
Work made in situ, a framework, a mindset, an intervention. Afloat on extravagantly changing light, localised ambient sounds – performative and real – in every possible sense. A literal, physical and “sportif” tuning in and tuning out of a particular location, which I intent to mark on my global map, I keep at home in county Donegal
The brevity and spontaneity of participation in super-sport art action compresses my logic as well as artistic means: I give myself over to illusions of operative transmission, translation, transitive, pulsing, light, refrigeration, regeneration, song and performance. Through the changing surfaces of sound and light, I make a stab in at integrating impacts of translucency, reflection, echoes and the mirroring qualities of the material I have brought with me all the way from Xinpi.
As on the surface of a visual plane, I seek sound production, using my breath and finger work, to transmit fluty piercings, openings and feedbacks. A message in a bottle of light, so, lyrical notes puncturing punctuating, intimations and invitations to participating audience and visitors, a trans- and transitive dimension of experience.
We are on city limits of Metropolis Athens, dis-remembering and dismembering an eschatological encounter with an off limits space, a high rise interface trapped between abandoned buildings and roadside detritus: facing the vertigo of crossing above fast lanes, the seismic tremors of crossing below an intersection, a through-road underpass, set the clock ticking on a happening in extremis.
Greeted by familiar faces at the base of a vast brutalist edifice, of such immense proportions, as though brutalism itself were an aesthetic, being defined for the first time;
A long abandoned deep freezer factory, re-abandoned, occupied and re-occupied by a motley of invitees, Berlin friends, some Supersport adepts, under the part-time and compassionate tutelage of Institut für alles Mögliche, Athens.
Without much time, or even fewer materials, I set to work on a Friday evening, at closing time. Next morning, scouting along Monasteraki, Ermu, small markets, stalls and shops, in the company of Christine Kriegerowski and Tiger Stangl, returning to late afternoon real life – a no budget production of a forgotten circle of the Divine comedy:
to darkness and light, an ocean of rain flooding from overhead the entrance stairwell, lighting our ascent and descent into the cavernous interior, glittering tokens of crushed glass and smithereens of myriad building materials: in dark space, in growing darkness, who could have imagined such a happening happening here?
The day of the show, an encounter of studied reflection, improvisation, organised and cooperative work, giving life to and magically maintaining late into the night all the functions and functioning of an artistic and social gathering and intervention:
an exchange of what might otherwise have been characterised as of an extra terrestrial order, in reality, not least in my experience, a meeting of minds in a collective and cooperative act of resistance to the dereliction of an already derelict space.
Working this abandoned space, an extraordinarily magical sequence of “art”works and “art-in-work” installations came quickly into being, made fiction out of the social constraints that always resist and constrain every singular and pluralistic effort at transformation: a participatory art practise, an entire apparatus of policing and control, dissipated and dispersed in front of our eyes and in the embrace of our improvised works and performances.
By disgorging activities such as these in the void of a social dystopia, an especial thanks to Karl-Heinz Jeron: as far as I can see, Supersport is both the cause and effect of a given reality, a true event, authenticating itself in the vanishing point of its own foundation.
