Tag: Performance Home

Performing for the archive; the archive is a performance.

For Louise Liliefeldt’s Performance Home project, over the course of fall/winter 2021, the artist is taking a deep dive through her personal archive of materials, photos and videos documenting her performance practice over the last 20 plus years.

On the surface, the goal is to create a website that illustrates Liliefeldt’s practice, providing a chronological history for those familiar with her work and for new audiences. Behind the surface however is the endless work of sifting, sorting, accessing and editing that the archive needs from us. How does the performance artists make order from what is essentially ephemeral, chaotic and non-linear?

This project was partially funded by the Ontario Arts Council. The website design is by Kathleen Smith of 7Pirouettes.

www.louiseliliefeldt.com

In a sense, the idea for my residency formed in the summer of 2019 in Turkey before the pandemic and before I even knew about the possibility of a residency. While I visited my home city of Istanbul after a 13-year hiatus, I unknowingly germinated the urge to move back there for a year.

Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic put a hold on my half-realized plans. My urge, fortified by powerlessness, transformed into a craving, an itch, a determination to explore the hunger I felt for Turkey.

This year, 2021, started with a concept of making a video in my childhood home in Istanbul. The apartment is uninhabited, complete with old furniture from 80s and 90s, covered with dusty white sheets, with shutdown old windows and blinds, dull musty air and perhaps old spirits. A time capsule from the last lived day of 1994 before our Canadian emigration.

What would be like to go back and record a walk-through of this space, like an audience-less performance, like a home movie of a ghost of a home? The camera as all-seeing eye, from my apartment in Toronto to our apartment in Istanbul, through a distance of 8,196.58 kms?

While I am creating this video in my mind (for now,) walking through the space in my memory, I am also creating actual videos for my day job of auditioning for commercials, film, and TV. Countless of takes for a 30-second footage of pretending to eat a salad or some chips while scolding my imaginary children, acting like a senator or a Middle Eastern engineer, suggesting organic rice to my neighbour, gardening with a surprised look on my face, reading a bowl of cereal like a crystal ball, drinking from a river, thanking the public for being vaccinated and waking up happy in bed…

So now I’m thinking about the absurdity of the correlation of these two notions in video. The manufactured actions of commercial acting and the archival footage of home, stacked together like a building.

There is a video somewhere.

Like the end of Covid, it is unhurried, throbbing, reluctant and eager.

Irene Loughlin’s home—where she spent the 2nd Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, and continues to live—is a small one bedroom apartment she shares with one other person. This 20th floor remnant of rent control is a tall building on the Hamilton escarpment, a concrete monument to the 70’s. Loughlin’s apartment contains an enclosed glass balcony that she has converted into her studio. From there, during the first part of her Performance Home residency, Loughlin is working on a series of experimental video performances using her body to reach and sustain contact with the “outside,” extending her arms through windows to establish a personal choreography with the sky and clouds, changing weather and birds; and through various actions such as ‘embracing the building’ in gratitude for shelter.

Alongside this corporeal research practice, Loughlin is mining her performance documentation archive. Observations written during her entry level job in the film industry in the midst of the pandemic are included. Her writing and drawings contain references to the first lockdown when she lived alone, and the film industry shut down. She spent most of the first three months of lockdown on CERB (as did many privileged persons living in Canada), deriving mental and spiritual sustenance from walking in the forest. By walking outside—breaching government recommendations in the first weeks and months of the pandemic—she sought to preserve her ‘sanity’ as a neuroatypical person living through the first pandemic announcements. These walks were generally devoid of human presence, and she took solace in the company of emerging deer, hawks, and other animals, as well as plants, trees and waterfalls. The first lockdown in the forest mirrored her experiences as a child confused in the company of others and seeking relief in the natural world. Sources are translated into pen and ink drawings, juxtaposed with writing that comments on her experiences as a performance and visual artist. The work comes together in a newly self-designed literary hybrid—a performance art graphic novel—that combines past objectives with the emotive and ecological crisis of our current moment specifically from Loughlin’s neuroatypical perspective.

FADO’s on-going residency series, launched in 2020 in direct response to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Participating artists in 2020–2022
Simla Civelek
Louise Liliefeldt
Irene Loughlin