Commentary written by Kate Southworth, 2012
November emerged in 2006, in response to a reluctance to encounter the death and decay of winter, as a contemporary ritual to mark the change of season from summer to winter, and to prepare the soul for death. Patrick and I began thinking about it in the spring of 2006; a year before Patrick’s illness was diagnosed, and we did not have a conscious awareness that he was unwell. Whether or not related at an unconscious level, we both had an overwhelming reluctance to encounter the next winter and we felt fearful. In early summer on their annual ‘studio visits’ trip to Cornwall, Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, artists and curators and co-founders of Furtherfield, the UK’s leading new media organisation and platform, listened as we shared our fears with them. It was not something that we had intended to speak about, but in discussing Love Potion, a work that Garrett and Catlow had found very strange but to which they had lent enormous encouragement and support, Patrick and I mentioned that we were thinking of making a new work that we, ourselves, could enact as a ritual recognition of the approaching winter. At this point we had no notion of what form the ritual would take, but Marc and Ruth offered or agreed to be part of it.
In the following months, as fragments of the work developed, they emerged not as visuals and sound, but as a Calendric Ritual that imagined and proposed a transformative encounter between the elements and the participants.
The work was produced during the time when I was struggling to articulate the emergence of a distributed form in Love Potion art, and gives attention to and experiments with the concept of protocol as a medium in relation to the enactment of Calendric Rituals and everyday performances. The work, then, was devised as a ritual, an everyday performance whose parameters are disseminated through the medium of protocol. The protocols emerged gradually, over time, through processes of imagining their unfolding, and listening to their rhythms. In this sense, I would suggest that they are of a different order to protocols produced to control and organise, and that perhaps, they can be understood, with reference to Bracha Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix, as fragile protocols. What I meant to suggest with this is that the protocols continue to exist and function as protocol – that is, they maintain their organisational form, but that also they refer to a web of potential transformational relations between elements. I am aware that this is to claim a great deal for a simple instructional work, and it may be that these particular sets of protocol are not fragile in the sense that I suggest. Nonetheless, my intention was to explore ways in which phallic modes of organisation and control potentially might be resisted.
The recording of the enactment of the protocols seems to me to enact a transformation in both a linear sense – from tension to release and laughter – and also in a healing sense. In the linear sense, the participants interact with each other in what seems to echo Van Gennap’s three stages of ritual. In the first stage participants break off their ordinary, everyday activities to come together temporally, and in virtual space. The intervening ‘liminal’ phase provides a place within which the ritual subject or passenger exists in a state of ambiguity, a place of transformation that has few attributes of the previous or future states of being. Even when mediated through technology the performers listened attentively to the other at the same time as reading their texts, producing a shared tempo. In the third phase, the subject is re-aggregated and re- incorporated into a relatively stable state. As the performance ends, the liminal space fades and the subjects re-affirm their discrete identities through processes of laughter and joking.[2] In a healing sense, I believe that the performers, through their generosity of listening and sharing, open themselves to the possibility of a shared encounter at a sub-subjective level. In the video of the performance each participant is reacting to particular words, or facial expressions, actions or rhythms of the other. The potential emerges, although it is not guaranteed, for the performance to be transformed from what might be a repetition of, acting out our fears about death and decay into what Bracha Ettinger terms a healing event-encounter. To be clear, although a work of art offers the possibility of a passage to the remnants of trauma and joy within a matrixial borderspace, such a passage is not guaranteed.
In the video of the performance participants listen attentively to the other at the same time as reading their texts: producing a rhythm that expands and then fades.a co-emergence and co-fading is seen. The performance begins and ends slowly and quietly. In between, the rhythm and the energy get faster reaching a peak that is followed with a release of laughter towards the end. Each participant is reacting to particular words, or facial expressions, actions or rhythms of the other, through which a collective instinct develops.
The performance consists of a braiding together of spontaneous and pre-meditated actions, such as reading from texts, listening, and improvised speech.
During the event, the performers collaboratively created a shared intimate space. Even when connected via webcam, a live narrative emerged as the performers listened attentively to the others at the same time as reading their text. Their overlapping voices produced a rhythm that contracted and expanded, pulsated, ebbed and flowed.
Notes
1. Nancy Reilly McVittie, The Presence of Absence (A-gain) - Kathy Acker.
2. Victor Turner, “The ritual process,” 94-95.
3. http://dvblog.org/?p=318 [this entry has superceded the original June 2007 entry]
4. http://turbulence.org/blog/2006/10/31/november/#more-2504
Dissemination
Michael Szpakowski featured the recording on DVBlog with the following text in which he makes the point again about over-explaining the work via the accompanying text.
An enchanting piece of networked performance from Kate Southworth & Patrick Simons a.k.a Glorious Ninth with Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett from the indispensable Furtherfield.org. I’ve admired Kate and Patrick’s work for a long time, partly for its sheer visceral beauty, but there’s an integrity, too, to what they do, a doggedness & a willingness, recently in particular, to take risks – to follow their instincts. I think it pays off richly here. Here’s a technical, blow by blow description. Read it then forget it & just go with the strange &compelling rhythms of the piece.[3]
The performance of the ritual was announced ahead of time and information about it was distributed widely online. For example, see Networked Performance blog from Turbulence.[4]