Breach of Close

Rob Kennedy, Possible Uses of Disorder

The space he had been given was a windowless, high-ceilinged room, one of several century-old unrestored structures built around the courtyard. It was more a stall than a studio. Slabs of plaster had fallen off the wall in places, exposing like an open wound roughly hewn stones of the outer masonry wall.

As I stood in the courtyard I could see a figure moving in the depths of the dimly lit room. Peering into the space I could see that the only light came from the screen of his laptop and a tile of light thrown on the wall from a small projector on the other side of the room. Hunched over his laptop in the dark, his chest of tools set open against one of the walls, he looked a little like a smith in his forge or a shaman in his tent. Except he wanted company.

As I entered the room he got up to greet me. He told his name (Rob Kennedy) and how he had gotten here (he was sponsored by the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow as an artist-in-residence in the Remap 3 contemporary art platform that is taking place in Athens until the end of October) and explained a bit about the project. From what I understood it was an installation in progress that was being shaped by the encounters he had with other artists and visitors while here and by the space he worked in. The installation was slowly incorporating pieces of the immediate environment of his exhibition space—the objects he had found lying around the room and outside in the courtyard—and of the broader city environment.

One piece, a video installation he had brought with him from Scotland, or at least the core of the work: a small projector, a screen and a video loop.  The rest was found here. The projector was set on a folding stool he found in the space, laid on its side with a tile wedged between its legs. The screen was propped up on a precarious arrangement of bathroom tile, butter knife and sheets of printer’s paper, all also found in the space.  On the screen one saw a continuous loop of a short vintage clip showing an old man walking to a city street corner, accompanied by the monotonous repetition of a snippet of a child’s nursery rhyme.

Kennedy describes the project in this way:

Starting from a point that is an arbitrary zero and by way of reciprocal discussion something rudimentary begins to appear. What it gives shape to will be an accumulation of this language as it is translated both on paper or screen and through actions in physical space. This initial impetus will be developed locally according to use and re-use, relying on the contingencies of circumstance to foster a variety of (in)conclusions.

I was intrigued by this idea of re-combining used objects from a familiar environment with the chance finds of a new one, this quite literal idea of translation as moving across. I wonder if the artist was aware that the makeshift base of the installation, the acute precariousness of the support it provides (but for how long) might have a particularly trenchant symbolic significance in a country whose economy is about to implode.

But I am even more fascinated by how the story he tells in his space is being shaped in its telling, how the conversations he has with others and the objects he finds in the city will find a place in the installation and by their very incorporation into the project, change it. Kennedy’s installations are both recursive and outward-reaching, self-referential and open to new encounters and the “contingencies of circumstance”.

I envy him his residency though I’m not good at living out of a suitcase for a long period of time. Some people can. Jörg does it half the days of the year. And my friend Joanna says she wouldn’t even need the suitcase. She swears that if she were rich enough she’d spend her time travelling around the world, from city to city—without a suitcase. She’d board the airplane with her purse, having arranged beforehand with the hotel concierge—being filthy rich she’d only stay at the kind of hotel which would have a concierge who could serve as your personal shopper—to have bought her the  clothes and toiletries she’d need for her stay in the city. She’d be a traveler-in-residence. Like Kennedy’s installations, she would acquire, use and then divest herself of the objects of local use—subject, of course, to the contingencies of circumstances.

“Wouldn’t you miss your things?” I asked her, thinking of her 8-room flat in Brussels, or perhaps more of myself. I wouldn’t be able to reach such an extreme state of dispossession. I can strip down the excess in my flat but at least for now there’s a threshold of things I need to have around me. I need to be surrounded by my books and music, maybe not all of them, agreed, but some.  A favorite sweater. A pair of fraying jeans that have taken on the shape of my butt and legs like a mold. The things I cook with. These things make up part of my life. Or maybe it’s just that I feel more me when I’m with them.

“Darling, I’d be seeing all these marvelous places and meeting all these extraordinarily interesting people, why would I ever miss a sofa?” she said.

This post originally appeared in somewhat altered form in What’s Left of Nathan. The blog is part of project that documents acts of dispossession: each day an object, or set of objects, is thrown or given away. The text that “accompanies” this act may be  a very short story about the object itself; other times it explores ideas about the place and meaning of things in our lives and homes, the connections between objects, memory and desire.  The photograph to this text comes depicts an earlier (2010) incarnation of the installation on view at the Athens Remap 3.