As part of the ISEA '98
(InterSociety for Electronic Arts) symposium,
Manchester, U.K., September 1998
A performance by
Gaudi Hoedaya, Sarah Buist
and Sonja van Kerkhoff.
Still from the video projection
at the back of the lecture theatre.
|
Making Salt (The performance)
1998
As part of the ISEA '98 (InterSociety for Electronic Arts) symposium, Manchester, U.K., September 1998 A performance by Gaudi Hoedaya, Sarah Buist and Sonja van Kerkhoff. |
Still from the video projection at the back of the lecture theatre. |
|
Making Salt was created for a presentation at an electronic media symposium with the theme of "Terror". The terror of the information age, to us, meant the shapeless super-abundance of information itself. We decided to use salt in our presention-performance, as a metaphor for sifting information from the sea, and to remember Gandhi's stroke of genius. He used 'making salt' as an act of symbolic defiance to the British authorities who had monopolised its production and sale in India. So he marched to the sea, and made salt.
|
A few of the boards and texts with a detail of the video projection on the back wall. |
We wanted to ground our performance concerning this information age on something as ordinary as salt. A necessity of life, crystallised out of the formless sea by the act of (selection) filtering.
Our space for the performance began at the two entrances of a lecture theatre. Sarah Buist and Gaudi Hoedaya stood at each entrance and welcomed and ushered people into the centre space towards the back of the theatre. This forced the audience to sit next to each other and to sit behind me. I sat at a keyboard about halfway up the rows of the seats, waiting. I focussed on my texts, trying to let them be part of me rather than just memorise them. |
|
The doors closed and the video started. Sarah's images of a pair of hands, projected on the wall, formed the letters 'r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n' in letter by letter in sign language. It was not only our introduction but also a moment of silence and a reference to the theme of the other half of the ISEA symposium in Liverpool titled, "Revolution". |
|
Now the video projection on the front wall started and as I typed white letters appeared on five barely visible boards in between me and the front of the lecture theatre. The text began with these phrases: "The air is never vacant" she sighed. I listened with folded arms and inhaled the salty air. Lyotard didn't trust names, and everyday I discover more and more names. Names on the move. Cum grano salis. 
|
While working on the concept for this performance Gaudi and I discovered that rather than terror, we felt we were living in exciting times. For both of us, the world offered more possibilities than ever before and we wanted an approach that combined the poetic with the playful. For us the postmodern world is a world of possibility. |
....under construction.... 
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
text about space - idea of stage / frame within frame -developed into the website space. |
|
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Other works related to this theme
|
|
the medium |
 
| ||