Output details

Guttersnipe: a micro road movie

DESCRIPTION

Performance and installation, developing Piccini’s concerns with performative material-discursivities of place. Assembling archaeological ‘random sampling’, ‘lecture’ and ‘archive’, a video tracking shot of a Bristol gutter was juxtaposed with live performance to explore the multiplicity and intra-active dynamism of phenomena. Successive iterations considered how inclusion of recorded voiceover and sound design and relocation from performance to gallery space problematize video as ‘representation’, to open out its performative capacities.

Piccini conceived and filmed the work, incorporating archival materials, authored and found texts, and produced all edited versions and related publications.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

How can a performance-video practice explore:

1. the relationship between archaeological practices and material-discursive performativities of place?

2. the multiplicities and lively intra-actions of urban histories, landscapes, materialities?

3. the interplay between personal, community and academic meaning-making through scalar spatio-temporal assemblages of place?

4. how archaeology, video and performance are entangled apparatuses that enact, rather than represent, the world?

APPROACHES AND CONTEXT

In terms of artists’ moving image practices, explorations of place consider materiality, texture, ruin, memory and the liveness of screen events. Elsewhere, performance’s engagement with archive, object and image explore liveness and performance’s ontologies. Archaeology has frequently been mobilized as metaphor and trope in these works. This project, however, entangles archaeology-as-practice with video and performance as material-discursive, boundary-making events [see questions 1, 2 and 4] and explores how archaeological scale enacts ‘cuts’ that produce new video and performance aesthetics [see questions 1 and 4]. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Judith Butler’s writing on performativity and materiality, Piccini developed insights into video’s potential to refer back to the singularity of event and to craft difference. [See publications]

DISSEMINATION

Through performances and screenings at festivals; gallery exhibition; publication of findings, following papers at key conferences; online stand-alone video version. [See portfolio for details]