Project: Tate Modern
Method: Days of Action
Work: participatory performance: Solidarity Line, 2018
Collaborators: Sophie Warren & Jonathan Mosley with Hannah Davies (Liberate Tate/ Greenpeace)
Participants: Event 1 - public open call; event 2 - workers across the strata of Tate organisation; event 3 - students of MA Architectural History, UCL, Architecture, UWE, MA Politics and Art, UAL
Structure: Introduction; silent tour; training; performance; open-mic-lie-in reflection
Film: Solidarity Line, 2019
Duration: 5 minutes
Days of Action stages two collective actions which explore how the architecture of Tate Modern shapes the choreography of everyday movement. Our approach plays with design, function, hierarchies, governing rules and associated codes of conduct, seeking to reveal an architectural unconscious which reverberates in our minds and bodies. The building has power to move us; we have power to move. The actions navigate the secondary and circulatory spaces of Tate, travelling physically and acoustically across foyers, landings and bridges, through lobbies and up and down stairwells and escalators.
‘Solidarity Line’ uses the bodily formation of the defence line, that instead of defending territory, becomes a transient line – a moving border, a living architectural element. The participants, without speaking, draw on an embodied attentiveness to each other and the environment, navigating through the circulatory spaces of Tate Modern by collective intelligence. As the line moves with the topography of the architecture, the group feels the force of the line, a force larger than oneself. Stopping, starting, finding highs and lows, adapting to disequilibrium and the unevenness of planes. Here the building is negotiated not as antagonist, but as an affective force that can generate new socio-spatial possibilities.
Staff of Tate from across the different teams including cleaning and security staff, invigilators, administrators and curators were invited to take part. The action proposed new orders of movement that aimed to foster new relationships between the building and those who use it, and an interconnectedness between building members and their individual spheres of operation.
