Since we first began to shape it back in late 2019, as our last major public proposition before the following lockdowns and pandemic years enveloped us, the acts and intentions of this particular thread of our work have only been feeling increasingly close and current for us… 

Encouragingly, it has also become increasingly apparent that those feelings were not limited to us alone – as most of the subsequent public invitations we have received, from as soon as things began to open up and become possible again, have wanted to pick up on it in some way… And these invitations have now included two separate new commissions to reimagine and perform the specific propositions of On a clear day you can see for ever over the past year alone…

We have been trying to take advantage of the opportunities offered by these invitations, to continue our thinking and questioning of this ongoing and seemingly ever-expanding project… And over recent months have been reconsidering the situation and public event of this work, and of the structured act of our public disassembly of a used family car at its centre, in response to a specific commission and invitation from Sismògraf 2023 in Olot, Catalonia… 

And so here we find ourselves, in the middle of an intense new three-day version of this work – a version we have tried to shape to prioritise a more direct and intimate encounter, within the specifics of a more direct and intimate space… A place that we hoped might focus and grasp on to those things its functioning really relies on, while letting those less important resonate more quietly, or simply slip away… 

Two days in, this current act and situation is still happening, and still has to play out to its conclusion in this context… But it is already clear that there is both somewhere and something we had hoped to find happening here – a more overtly daily and provisional place perhaps, a situation becoming both increasingly more physically cluttered and performatively much less cluttered, in ways that feel they could be both helpful and helpfully less easy to settle…

It has been quite a long journey towards this specific manifestation of the work. And as we approach its end, even while still only halfway through the actuality of its particular public realisation and event, I already know that there are things about this surprisingly open and dusty little place that I am going to miss… and will be looking for ways to return to…

[ untitled video clips generated from details captured in performance – Brookes 2023]