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Misfortune does not travel with a bell:

A durational performance commissioned by IKRA Dance and Performance Art Festival in Haparanda Sweden.

Freeman (2007) has argued that an important precursor to post-modern performance art is installation art, which uses every element existing in its immediate surroundings – including the architecture, its ambience, the context and even the audience itself – as material for the work. Having come to performance from a background in installation, this has certainly been my approach to artmaking. One way to throw a spotlight on an aspect of our collective condition is to deal very precisely with the context of where we are, why we are there, what our

expectations are, and who we are based on visible cues.

In Lapland there is a saying, ’Misfortune does not travel with a bell’. Throughout the day, visitors joined me in a sauna with an open bar of local tar liquor and tar candy; the air is fragrant with tar essential oil thrown onto the hot stones. Local folk wisdom decrees that there are no ailments that cannot be remedied with sauna and tar. In this enticing communal space for curing all ills, visitors share stories of misfortunes that had crept up on them, that had beset them without warning, that had taken them by surprise. They then put their stories on paper and folded them into small origami envelopes, in which they enclosed a tinkling gold bell. Over the next days, in an act of reverse pick-pocketing, I slipped these little jingling parcels into people’s pockets and bags. They will later discover anonymous stories of misfortunes that had actually snuck up (without a bell) on the citizens of Haparanda.

‘Misfortune…’ was performed again at SPILL Festival of Performance in Ipswich in 2012.