<fragments [ less than fragments ] : Mike Brookes

can everyone see me if I stand on this chair?

Last night Rosa Casado and I performed the first public work from our What if everything we know wrong? project, under the chandeliers and crystal wall lights of Brown’s Alumnae Hall, where we tried to reconstruct somewhere else – somewhere specific that we know, and have been trying to unpick.

From a bag containing thirty pocket dictaphones, three polaroids and a piece of chalk, we built a meeting place under the title Natural is how you found things when you checked-in - a line taken from a lecture by the late Buckinster Fuller – for a crowd gathered within the otherwise cleared room.

The polaroids imperfectly detailed two chairs and a radio. The chalk simply allowed me to locate those objects at scale. The dictaphones carried fragments and details of captured sound, and one archive recording from Buckminster Fuller’s epic forty-two hour lecture – recorded over two weeks of January 1975 – which he called Everything I know.

unnecessary activity in a room

Over this past week it has become increasingly clear that the work we are trying to propose here is simply a visible public attempt to construct one place, from collected fragments and details, within another place, where it wouldn’t otherwise be present – and the use of that attempt to allow the possible meeting place that then becomes at least apparent in that act. There are other things that we enjoy doing at the same time, and other things that we would like to be able to do there – but in reality, none of them are helpful.

The more I explore drawing to locate those otherwise absent details, for example, the more minimal the ‘pictorial’ elements of the place I am trying construct demand to be – however engaging the hastily drawn forms and the act of their drawing might be.

So I am focusing on what I can directly construct from a bag full of fragments of captured sound. And limiting the pictures simply to a few objects that are useful for us to have with us, but which aren’t present. In this instance, what I can build directly with placed sound is both more tangible and more complex. And retains enough of the ambivalence and indifference – and reality – of both places.

If that is where this work sits, that is where we will work with it.