Messenger

“searching coordinates for scars, experience and future potential”

artist notes (February 2016)

“periphery as a metaphor, light as companion”

artist notes (February 2016)

Concept

Messenger explores the idea of returning to the intimate – in an imaginary and geographical matrix – as an ambulatory process of transmitting the message, the experience, the past trauma, the thought with future potential. It constitutes a peripatetic poem, which explores wandering as poetic process from Odysseus to flaneur, along with poetry narration. The artist uses his method of walking with objects into sites, underlining body-object-site relations. The process of returning focuses to the intimacy of the place not as a suspension of the evolution but as a reconsideration of perspective towards the future. It brings together the aesthetic, repetitive and becoming aspect of walking with the companion of light bulb as an embodied and performative object that inscribes artist’s though in place. Messenger reveals a psychogeography of the periphery, an auto-ethnographical approach of personal and collective memories woven in-situ through imaginary, material and performative ways. The peripheral spaces and traversed landscapes are seen as a becoming site with poetic, emotional and political potential; having light as a metaphor towards a spatial and embodied enunciation of thought.

Description

Walking performance for camera, custom made light bulb, poetry

Technical: Full HD video, colour, 16:9, stereo sound, single channel, English subs

Duration: 9’

Year: 2016

Credits

Concept - Performance - Creation: Bill Psarras

Subtitling: Nadia Georgiou (>)

Selected Exhibitions

The work was commissioned for the group exhibition NICE! Is Return Possible, co-curated by Salon de Vortex (Yiannis Grigoriadis & Yiannis Isidorou); supported by NEON (2016). Exhibition photos also available here

Messenger has been also exhibited across numerous festivals such as FILE Art and Technology 2019 (BR), Future Project (UK), Fringe Arts Bath Festival (UK), Boston Biennial 5 (US), Matera Intermedia Festival (IT) among others.

Courtesy of the artist | © 2020 Bill Psarras