DEPUTISED OBJECTS
Project: Le siège du Parti communiste français (PCF HQ)
Method: Deputised Objects
Work – interactive installation: Deputised Objects, 2024
Materials: PLA, electronics, laptop, projector
Dimensions: Variable
Collaborators: Sophie Warren & Jonathan Mosley with Lita-Crociani-Woodland & Nigel Williams
Technical assistance and printing: Patrick Thornhill, Tom Garne and Ben Starling of Bristol UWE; Jack the Maker.
Film: Diogo Martins, Sophie Warren, Jonathan Mosley
Performer: Yola Pinto
Sound: Soundforce Studio
Duration: 13 minutes
Deputised Objects documents a performance within an interactive installation by Warren + Mosley. Two deputies stand in for and speak for a building: one a physical object and one a virtual, haunting object. Both are doubles of the French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris designed by Oscar Niemeyer, embodying the architectural motifs of the building and its psychological characteristics. The viewer, within this film a performer, is enlisted as a third protagonist in a transitional space of encounter and play. Each entity can act on behalf of the other and enjoys the power of affect. The ‘dance’ that ensues between the three entities expresses an unknown known - what we don’t know we know - that the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the animate and inanimate are more blurred than we might think they are.
The work draws on Donald Winnicott’s notion of ‘transitional objects and space’1, that provide an intimate world of encounter and play for the infant, enabling the child to mature from playful rehearsal to relational engagement with an outer world. We deploy his thinking within this spatial installation to develop more empowered and mutually affective relations with architecture and its objects.
1. Donald Winnicott (1971) ‘Playing and Reality’, London: Tavistock Publications
Hello. Who are you? Who are we?
Small recognitions. Hesitations. Interchangeability and overlaps.
We-feeling.
Doubles. Shadows and hauntings.
Hovering at the edge of memory.
Inhale. Exhale.
Have you come from the past or from the future? Are you a premonition of what is yet to come?
Bodies that have a spectral appearance, that visit and live their true lives elsewhere.
Architecture and its deputies.
Gravitational pull gathering all moveable bodies.
Architectural choreography.
A social choreography.
Here is a space of play with its own space-time coordinates.
Play as a state in which meaning is in flux, in which possibility thrives, in which versions multiply, in which the confines of what is real are blurred, buckled, broken.1
Play as endless transformation without end.
‘One-liners’ written for the performer in Deputised Objects, 2024.
1. Tim Etchells (1999) ‘Certain Fragments: Texts and Writings on Performance’, London: Routledge, p53