Ongoing Project: Cally Spooner
Collapsing in Parts
Ongoing
www.callyspooner.internationalprojectspace.org
For her solo exhibition at International Project Space Cally Spooner will produce a new body of writing over a period of eight months. Beginning with a framework without content, Spooner plays with a form of performance as promise, whereby this promise, and the anxiety to produce, becomes a part of the performance itself. Examining the crisis of publicness, progress and the loss of private life, Cally Spooner’s writing will be published in eight parts and made public online as they are written, enacting the process of ‘thinking out loud’ integral to all of Spooner’s work. A series of programmed live events will act as footnotes to the evolving text, adding to the cast of borrowed voices and characters Spooner employs to shape and articulate her own thinking.
With outputs ranging from performance, film and broadcasting, Spooner writes in dialogue to script the anxieties and obstructions of turning theory into thought, thought into text and text into events (plays, projects and productions). Drawing on theatrical tropes and devices, she embodies this movement between states using historical thinkers as alibis to help her write, and casts of colleagues, friends and actors to help her perform. By fracturing her writing into parts for her cast to carry, she finds and occupies multiple positions through collisions of arguing characters, looping narratives and unrelenting disturbances from impossible stage directions, most often delivered by Spooner herself.
Spooner’s work typically emerges from systems of research within which editions, acts, versions or chapters are scripted and performed. These exist alone as smaller pieces, contributing to the live and public unravelling of her thinking. They eventually settle into larger multi-part productions, films and readings packed with slippages, disjunctions and the promise of future events. Her work occupies the space between extremes; freedom and regulation, speaking and text, chaos and control, as she frenetically finds something to say, do and write, whilst destabilising any fixed or conclusive form.
The project can be followed online at www.callyspooner.internationalprojectspace.org
Accompanying 'footnote' events and performances, hosted at International Project Space and at other venues will be announced as the project progresses.
Footnote 1: An Extraordinarily Unnecessary Interlude To Civility
Footnote 2: The Erotics of Public Possiblity
Footnote 3: It's 1957, And The Press Release Still Isn't Written
Footnote 4: And Yet, There They Still Are!
Footnote 5: A Six Stage Manifesto On Action solo performer, and multiple musicians
Cally Spooner (b. 1983) is an artist based in London. Recent solo presentations include At Five to Ten, Neue Alte Bruecke, Frankfurt (2010) and A Solo Event for Thinking, Basso, Berlin (2009). Recent group shows include Outrageous Fortune, Hayward Touring; Double Bill (with Tai Shani), LOOP Festival, Barcelona; The Department of Wrong Answers, Wysing Arts Centre (all 2011); Perform a Lecture!, The Office (curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Dieter Roelstraete), Arsenale, Berlin; With Words Like Smoke, Chelsea Space, London (both 2010).
