| unperson | ||||||||||
| Mountain Standard Time performance festival 2001
the new gallery::::calgary:::::april 10 2001 |
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| this project was begun after seeing the radio canada international antenna site outside sackville, where antennas are strung between high poles in patterns that look like cat’s cradle figures ... cat's cradle is played with a loop of string that goes around the fingers of both hands to make a pattern.....there is a complicated way to pass the figure to another person.......is it supposed to remain intact? or change? .......i looked up “cat’s cradle” at the library and found the story of julia petrova-averkieva, who visited the west coast of canada in 1923 to collect the string figures of the kwakiutl people.......she developed a system for notating the moves that made a figure take shape over time....her system is apparently open to interpretation ... the figures are difficult to reproduce from her instructions...........julia returned to russia and spent time in the gulag for perceived mistakes........unperson is a word I remember from reading about political prisoners in Russia.....it refers to someone who disappears..... unperson would be the English translation of a Russian word that loops behind it, out of sight
episodes from julia's biography were rewritten into a series of versions, each one with certain details changed... recordings were made of laura telling the stories...these were burned to separate tracks on a CD that played in random mode during the performance video footage of laura threading a fish hook was reshot from a monitor and shown during performance performance documentation by laura kavanaugh |
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