Let's make a world: A world to be alive in

Abstract

These four pages of mixed-media material document bring to light our creative ideas, processes and performances with a simple number annotation system placed on two basic maps of the city of New York (USA) and the city of York (UK). The annotated artwork is cross-referenced to a critical and reflective talk for audiences scored with coffee breaks, pauses and childhood dreams. Our collaborative practice produced a 12-minute Super 8 mm film Kong Lear and a limited-edition boxed archive of loose-leaf pages made up of mixed-media images and performance texts, whose pages represent a range of what may be classed as ephemera stemming from the process of making the film, presenting it in a gallery exhibition and also its promotion and dissemination. The pages also surface some of the crossroads and meeting points of the material we are interested in and annotates those crossroads. We share the artistic process of documentation as performance for the page and manage the slippage between the ecologies of the live and the environments of the documented, which paradoxically are a movement of sorts—a body as a form—with a head, a skin, a heart and footsteps. The documentation makes a world, a world to be alive in and a silent world to sleep in; it accumulates information to produce semantic layers of past action through a lens of endless possibilities for the imaginal screen.