Project: Tate Modern

Method: Days of Action

Work: participatory performance: What is the Building Calling for? 2018

Collaborators: Sophie Warren & Jonathan Mosley with Hannah Davies (Liberate Tate/ Greenpeace)

Participants: Event 1 - workers across the strata of Tate organisation; event 2 - 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: What is the Building Calling for? 2019

Duration: 8 minutes

What is the Building Calling for? uses the human microphone to collectively address the building. Participants’ responses to the question become the content for a vocal and spatial action relayed through its circulatory spaces. It’s a chance to speak for the building as if it was one of us, with hopes and desires, longings and conflicts. As the first speaker begins, words are repeated and relayed by the group across voids, along corridors and down sweeping stairwells, until the building resounds and vibrates with one collective voice.

What is the Building Calling For? uses devices from civic resistance and direct democracy to explore a corporal and sensorial experience of being together in Tate's architectural spaces. Here the building is negotiated not as an antagonist but as a creative protagonist. Together we shape new social and spatial orders; to involve both human and nonhuman in the construction of ‘we’.

Days of Action was commissioned as a satellite work to Tania Bruguera’s Turbine Hall commission, drawing on the theme of movement. The actions happened three times, each within a half day event, each with a different range of participants. The events begun with an introduction and preparatory training. This included a silent tour of the architecture. The actions followed with an open mic-lie-in to reflect on the experience.