implicit art

A continuation from The Wireframe Series: Sentimental Construction #1, performance 2 (passage) is a similarly site-specific, publicly performed architectural structure made of rope. The piece, erected in Joubert Park, Johannesburg South Africa (2007), twists the idea of ‘public space’ by its double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch its form outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the park’s inhabitants, which gives the structure a performative turn.

Although the design is, itself, a passage – several doorframe shapes in series, swinging freely from atop four wooden poles – it can only move between hard and soft, virtual and actual, public and private, through its contact with people. This is juxtaposed with the inconsistencies of South Africa’s major inner-city: crumbling art deco buildings surrounded by crowded streets and busy taxi ranks, all making way for the quiet of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s neo-classical architecture, and the leisurely games, picnics and ice cream stands in the inexplicably carved-out Joubert Park. The surrounding areas of the park have historically been a bundle of contradictions – before, during and after Apartheid – sustained as civic spaces because of how they’re used by the public. performance 2 playfully mirrors the contradictions of this space and its utility, and further underpins the tensions between work and play, nostalgia and possibility, construction and emergence.

video documentation

download as quicktime or ogg / theora

Performers / Documentarians: Brendan Copestake, Ismail Farouk, Anthea Moys, João Orecchia, Rat Western. Click for photos and sketches.

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