Tate Modern
Commissioners:
Tate Modern / Tate Exchange / Spike Island
Collaborators:
Sophie Warren, Jonathan Mosley, Hannah Davies ( Liberate Tate / Greenpeace )
Methods:
Days of Action
If Tate Modern is a building with an organising mentality, what would this look and feel like? It has passed through many imaginings and been influenced by many factors, both conscious and unconscious that affect its legibility and our experience of it. As a structure it is more than just a building, it is a material and psychological testimony to our past and a vision of the future. As a ‘psychostructure’ there will always be two buildings in mind, a cathedral of sublime industrial power and a powerhouse of culture. One body and mentality intersecting and fusing with another.
Days of Action stages two collective actions which expose how the architecture of Tate Modern, in its design, function and hierarchies of space, and its associated codes of conduct and governing rules, shapes the choreography of everyday movement. The method uncovers an architectural unconscious within the psychostructure that reverberates in our minds and bodies. The actions navigate the secondary and circulatory spaces of Tate, moving physically and acoustically across foyers, landings and bridges, through lobbies and up and down stairwells, escalators and lifts.
Solidarity Line and What is the Building Calling For? use 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 exchanged for the other, the counterprotest or authority, to be negotiated not as an antagonist but as a creative protagonist in the shaping of new acoustic territories, and social and spatial orders. The actions rethink ways of being separately together that involve the nonhuman in the construction of ‘we.'
What is the Building calling for? uses the human microphone to collectively address the building. The 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 lead speaker begins the address, words are repeated and amplified by the group across voids and inclined planes, along corridors and down sweeping stairwells until the building resounds and vibrates with one collective voice.
Solidarity Line uses the bodily formation of the defence line from civic resistance to practice a new choreographic order for Tate’s spaces. One where individuality is constantly negotiated according to the needs and demands of the group and built form. As arms link and lock and the group move as one line no one is sure who is leading and who is following. As the line moves with the topography of the architecture, stopping, starting, finding highs and lows and adapting to the disequilibrium and the unevenness of planes, the group feel the force of the line, a force larger than oneself. It’s pain, joy, power over and power to all the way to the end of the line. But let’s not forget, this is only a rehearsal, a call to remember that collective intelligence works.
Event 1: Visiting public. Event 2: Workers from across the strata of Tate organisation. Event 3: MA students of Architectural History and Curating (UCL), Architecture (UWE), Art and Politics (UAL).
Participants:
For each event: Collective training, silent tour, action - ‘Solidarity Line’. Proposition and response, training, action - ‘What is the Building Calling for?’, open-mic lie-in.
Programme:
Works:
Solidarity Line
What is the Building Calling for?