Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [ArtCouple]
With a recent outbreak of coronavirus here at BasementArtsProject, ah the difficulties of running an art project in a family home, we were forced to isolate and postpone, yet again, the project by Simon Bradley and Ursula Troche aka: ArtCouple. The time frames are compressing and expanding at such a rate of knots it is enough to give you the bends.
Their exhibition will be going ahead next year now. We have one more project this year that we aim to realise before 21 becomes 22, covid notwithstanding of course.
Meanwhile, whilst I am here in Dortmund as part of the ‘Meine Welt Auf Corona’ exhibition here is another entry for the ‘Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition’, this time by ArtCouple.
ArtCouple: Compressed Time Frames
“Man is not rational; only what encompasses him is intelligent”
We’re interested in the transformation of material: socially, historically, geologically, ecologically biologically and biographically. Our process unfolds through dialogue based on an associative logic. Metonymy is our favourite transmitter—things stand for us, and we stand for things. We stand for each other.
Frames of time have shifted again and again for this exhibition.
We had both been working on separate constellations orbiting an enduring fixation with Time, for some time. Our original Basement Arts exhibition, ‘basement[in]versions’, was due to occur in Summer 2020 but Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown put paid to that. Since then, our slot was incrementally shifted to Autumn 2021. Even here we were facing a compressed time frame as events unfolded and it turned out that our closing performance would coincide with a suddenly resurrected Leeds Light Night, which might have deterred people from leaving the central nexus of Leeds, and venturing out into the throbbing artery of Beeston!
Spiralling back to what now seems to be an Age of Innocence, before lockdown, Simon found himself leaving a basement that he had inhabited for around 30 years. Spiders had figured large in this environment, and one particular cobweb that had developed over almost as many years, proved impossible to leave behind. Thus began Simon’s initial idea for a basement displacement, reconfiguring the past in a different basement site. Many stories began to unravel, developing a web of stories between us, homing in on fleeting, impossible to realise, threads.
Ursula looked at the cobweb story as an origin, which gave some kind of birth: she brought egg-boxes to it, which she had gathered to keep shells in. Shells as signs of the sea, and as the remains of something that had a life, just as the cobweb had.
In time, those egg-boxes resonated in turn with one of Simon’s sculpture pieces, a piece made from private papers, at one time crucial to his past life, but now more burden than utility. The papers were mulched down to pulp, just like the egg boxes, and formed into a new being: Private Member (affectionately known as ‘Privey’).
Gradually, the accumulating pieces began to seek out a frame, a venue for time-based products.
The cobweb continued to reverberate through Ursula’s constant experimentation with textiles, yarns, threads and lines extending through space, connecting elements, trees, and stones, bringing the unlikely into uncanny togetherness. Webs and nets. Nets around fruit and veg, resembling fishing nets, and spaces in between: between nets is where the 'internet' lies.
Even though people are becoming increasingly aware of the hidden material threads that join us together through articulations such as the ‘Wood Wide Web’, the wanton destruction of the delicate balances in our world continues unabated. Through sharing, exchanging and recycling both materials and ideas, our practice necessarily points us towards addressing climate crisis, which is intimately bound up with the pandemic in particular, and with the general crisis facing capitalism. Our individual and collective responses to this situation are vital We were hoping that our Basement Arts installation would energise us in the run-up to COP26, but it has once more been postponed—just like the pledges and assurances of our leaders. But now, time is up.
The title for the show was found in Workington railway station, announcing the mysterious logic of the Covid railway. As Zoom was entering our lives big time, paper timetables and all the hazards that fester within them were receding. Timetables were being replaced. By what? Nothing. Nobody has a clue.
See you at COP26!