<fragments [ less than fragments ] : MIKE BROOKES

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Carrying Rubén [exhibit]

The traces of the carry and assemblege are now set-up and running within this open and developing public gallery space here at Azkuna Zentroa.

In other parts of the gallery are now also an accumulating mountain of the city’s rubbish – already about a tonne of it, diverted into the gallery from its usual route between collection to recycling (Belén Cueto and Rosa Casado) – and a 120m² living garden of invasive and locally illegal species of plant and animal (Kris Verdonck)…

The remains of the carry itself have now settled into a quarter of the space: the entire unedited footage from both journeys of Wednesday’s action here in Bilbao running on a pair of wall-mounted monitors, the equivalent footage from the original Cardiff carry in 2001 running on identical monitors on the opposite wall, and my table of timelines and documents – minus the machines and mixing eqipment I used, but otherwise as I finished with it on completion of my performance here – still standing in the middle of the floor between them…

…From a city scale public intervention to gallery proposal in just one day… These traces will be available here, along with those accumulating from the other works within this gallery programme, until the doors are finally closed this Saturday night June 4th…

Images: Brookes 2016

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Carrying Rubén

As I write these notes – in the gallery space of the Azkuna Zentroa here in Bilbao – Salut Bueno, Nazario Díaz, Amai Fernández, Axier, Joel and Rubén Mateos Lima are preparing to help each other across the city centre, on foot, and without the aid of Rubén’s wheelchair.

We have already made this journey once today: from 11:00 this morning Salut, Nazario, Amai and Axier carried Rubén from Plaza Nueva to this gallery space, in a series of short journeys of precisely nine minutes duration – attempting to reach agreed locations within these allowed times, and being filmed by Joel and I as they walked. At each location, they then paused for a few minutes rest, and posed for a group polaroid, before moving on… In front of me, on the 12m tabletop I have now laid out in the centre of this vast 45m room, and which is providing the focal hub of this work and its performance, I have a series of nine polaroid snapshots and eight numbered video SD cards – already the only physical documentary remnants of that journey.

This evening, the rest of the group will all attempt to retrace that same journey exactly – across a city that, within the space of a few hours, has changed it’s nature. Cycle couriers Osvaldo Navia Canelo and Ricardo Flores Rojas will bring the video footage back to me here, within ten minutes of it’s making, out there… And here in this room, with a time delay equal to the time it takes for the videos to be filmed and then carried here, I will assemble possible views onto both journeys from the material available to me… That time delay will mean that the group will arrive here, carrying Rubén down and into this gallery space, some 30mins before the completion of my reconstruction of their journey – allowing us all to meet and watch the composite footage of their arrival together…

I am very much looking forawrd to this. It has already been a great day – from stepping out into the crowded city streets this morning, to seeing Rubén being carried in through the gathered media of the formal press launch of this festival on our arrival here to complete the first journey… A lot has happend in the fifteen years since Carrying Lyn back in 2001. That act, as we shaped and performed it for the first time, undoubtedly revealed possibilites that have informed much of my subsequent work. And revisiting this work here and now, in the cold light of those subsequent experiences – and with the commitment and open daily pragmatism that Rubén and his friends have brough to this task, within the central streets of their city today – has not only clarified, but also expanded, its intentions and proposal…

Images: phone shots – Brookes 2016

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reconsidering ‘Carrying Lyn’

I am currently in Bilbao, preparing Carrying Rubén – a commissioned reconsideration and re-enactment of the multi-site Pearson/Brookes work Carrying Lyn, that Mike Pearson and I conceived and performed in Cardiff back in 2001, as our first multi-site city work…

Almost exactly fifteen years later, next Wednesday May 25th, I’ll perform Carrying Rubén – with Rubén Mateos Lima, a local performer with advanced multiple sclerosis, and a small but committed group of his friends – within the central streets and Azkuna Zentroa Gallery space of Bilbao, as the opening performance of the city’s new exploratory site-specific art programme Prototipoak.

Following the structure of the original work, the group will carry Rubén across the centre of the city, videoing themselves as they go. They will make this journey twice: firstly in the middle of the working day, and then again that same evening – attempting to retrace their earlier journey exactly, across a city shifting in character as it passes from day to night.

Throughout their evening journey, cycle couriers will rush the video footage being shot out on the street back to the gallery space, where I will attempt to assemble and reveal the event, in real time, with a twenty-minute time delay, from the fragments of material that becomes available – incorporating material retained from their first journey, polaroids, maps, and a series of short recorded reflections on the contemporary city.

Carrying Rubén has been commissioned as part of the gallery thread of the Prototipoak biennial. The large subterranean gallery space has been curated by Rosa Casado to function as a porous informal hub space within Azkuna Zentroal, from where five works will attempt to open a series of specifically framed views out onto aspects of the landscape and use of the city around it.

The other four works within this gallery programme have been commissioned from artists Kris Verdonck (Belgium), Graeme Miller (UK), Belén Cueto (Spain) and naturalist and sound recordist Carlos de Hita (Spain)… The five of us have been working with Rosa over the past six months to shape specific new works from the projects she selected, all of which have had only one previous manifestation.

And this week we are working around each other. And will be accumulating fragments and traces of our actions within the public gallery space as we go…

<fragments [ less than fragments ] : MIKE BROOKES

\ Carrying Rubén

Carrying Rubén [exhibit]

Carrying Rubén

reconsidering ‘Carrying Lyn’