<fragments [ less than fragments ] : Mike Brookes

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Houston, we’ve had a problem

Yesterday saw the latest version of our initial work from What if everything we know is wrong? – performed under soft early evening sunlight, within one of the large empty shower rooms of this former pit head bath house, amongst the vast Zollverein colliery site here in Essen.

This time we subtitled the event Houston, we’ve had a problem – a quote from the American astronaut James Lovell. And after building what we had hoped to meet here, again using only those few fragments and tools that we had chosen to carry in to the room with us, we left everyone following the crackling audio from a contemporary documentary record of the almost fatal Apollo 13 space flight of 1970.

And that is where we leave the work for now. And shift our focus to other projects for the rest of the summer. Giving the meetings of this month’s interventions a little time and distance to mature and settle. Confident, at least, that there is something tangible to pick up again, when we next decide to return to this conversation.

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quiet queen

five minute queen [silent], video fragment captured on mobile phone, sound removed, dimensions and proportions variable, Mike Brookes 2012 – from the ongoing small pieces of everything series.

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what if everything we know is wrong?

Last weekend, commissioned to perform the initial work from our developing What if everything we know is wrong? project, Rosa Casado and I stepped into a large clear room in Artium – Vitoria’s ten year old contemporary art gallery – carrying a bag of pocket dictaphones, a small roll of tape, a black marker pen, and four polaroid photographs. This time we subtitled the event Nosotros pusimos los muertos y ellos disfrutan del cuadro - a quote taken from the writings of painter Antonio Saura (which translates roughly as: We provided the dead and they enjoy the painting). Ultimately using the place built by the work as a context to introduce a recorded reading of Saura’s polemic text Contra el Guernica (Against the Guernica), written in response to the arrival of Picasso’s Guernica in Spain in 1981. Our contribution to the gallery’s current celebrations of the painting’s 75th anniversary.

Turning our attention back to this work, after laying the foundations for it last summer, feels quietly positive and timely. And as we have often found in recent years – especially with our most direct interventions – the piece has matured since our last meeting with it, simply by having become a reality in our subsequent thinking.

So now we have gathered up our dictophones and moved the next phase of the project to Essen, where we have taken up residency in PACT Zollverein – another ten year old cultural centre, but this one housed within the former shower facilities of the largest colliery in the Ruhr – part of the vast Zollverien colliery and coking plant complex, closed in the late 1980′s, and now listed as a UNESCO world cultural heritage site.

We will be here for the rest of the month. Three weeks to focus and develop our thoughts within the tangible calm and support of this venue, and the impressively pragmatic and expansive industrial architecture that hosts it. An opportunity to revisit everything we already know about this intimate work, acknowledge what is wrong with it, and find useful ways to live with it.