On Holes, Overlapping Work And Experimental Practices : The Time_Place_Space: Nomad Residency
In 2015, the Canada Council renewed its partnership with Arts House/Performance Space in Australia to have 3 Canadian interdisciplinary artists participate in the 2015 Time_Place_Space: Nomad. This travelling lab-based residency brought together over 25 artists to explore interdisciplinary and experimental practices while camping out together in Regional Victoria of Australia. One of the artists, Lisa Hirmer, agreed to share her observations about the residency, what she experienced and what she took home.
“In every story I tell comes
a point where I can see no further.
I hate that point. It is why they
call storytellers blind – a taunt.”
- Anne Carson, Short Talk on Homo Sapiens
In a way the Time_Place_Space: Nomad (TPS) residency laid out just such a taunt: a deliberate turn into uncertainty about what its final form would be. Unlike residencies with a clear focus on producing new work, TPS let go of specific intentions and instead rested relatively comfortably with the trust that putting good artists together would result in something worthwhile – even if it was unclear at the start what exactly that might be.
(The residency) rested relatively comfortably with the trust that putting good artists together would result in something worthwhile – even if it was unclear at the start what exactly that might be.
The potential in blurriness
There’s a blurriness to what was created at TPS: between creative practice and everyday life in camp, amidst overlapping projects and other artistic labours, in the gaps that exist between disciplines and cultures. The costumes from fellow Canadian Natalie Purschwitz's anti-camouflage workshop, for example, morphed into team uniforms, a sign of group identity, sun protection, a much-needed clean change of clothes, sometimes all at the same time. At the same time, performances repeated themselves as daily group exercise sessions or nightly entertainment.
This blurriness makes it complicated to point to specific new works, though there were certainly clear works produced, such as performances by Anne Riley and Nicole Barakat. This, of course raises interesting questions around legibility, intention, authorship, and so on. But, perching the residency on this instability seems an essential part of its success as an experimental lab. When we truly experiment, we don’t yet know the outcome of what we’re doing. In other words, there’s a lot of potential in the things we can’t quite focus on.
When we truly experiment, we don’t yet know the outcome of what we’re doing. In other words, there’s a lot of potential in the things we can’t quite focus on.
The “hole” phenomenon
The final work I created in collaboration with dance artist Sete Tele, The Watering Hole, was a deliberate gesture and yet exists, in the context of TPS, with deep blurry margins. It was a functional water condenser dug into the ground of the dry lake bed and a performance about human relationships and economies of water. But, after conceiving the work, Sete and I discovered that another artist, Malcolm Whittaker, was coincidentally interested in the concrete task of hole-digging as a metaphor for an artist's labour. And when standing in the middle of a dry lake bed under a hot sun, with only a few days to create our works, it became abundantly obvious that a project in need of a hole and a project about digging a hole should come together.
Combining the projects was a practical choice but also a conscious suspension of the preciousness that can often surround the creation of art; it was a purposeful introduction of porousness into the work. This porousness, along with the generosity of the digging team, opened up the hole as something communal and something capable of taking on multiple simultaneous forms and meanings. Though it began as two sympathetic overlapping projects, it also became something concrete that the 6-person digging team could focus our energy on. Then for other artists it became a source of clay, a site for performance and a ceremonial receptacle.
At the same time, it also somehow turned into an active character of camp life, inspiring haikus and dishes at artist-created meals (both at TPS and afterward). By the end of the residency, when the time came to fill in the hole, it felt like something that belonged to the entire camp. And after an improvised performance lecture-turned ceremony, the fill-in happened almost without words – a spontaneous choreography of people jumping in to shovel, scoop, push and kick dirt until the hole was gone.
“Perhaps too often in our lives, we artists are pushed – or, we push ourselves – into saying what the thing is going to be before it has been done.”
It is difficult to capture the entirety of the phenomenon that was “the hole” because it acted in so many ways at once, including back out into the residency itself. In a sense it is a very unstable creation, triggered by an initial gesture but then held between many different authors. This instability seems important, this not knowing, this blindness to what it was even after the fact. Perhaps too often in our lives, we artists are pushed – or, we push ourselves – into saying what the thing is going to be before it has been done. TPS offered a space to exist with that blindness. I feel sure that the implications of this project will play out in my work, and I suspect that of many of the other artists as well, but it's important that we don't know quite how yet.
Anne Carson, Short Talks (London, Canada: Brick Books, 2004), 13.
