MIKE BROOKES [ archives and chronologies : actions / interventions ]

 

divine matter : an action and gallery work defined by the performed reconstruction of a late-renaissance European colonial-period religious painting, and the interconnections activated and embodied in its physical composition – attempting as faithful a reproduction of the original painting as possible, in appearance and physical construction, and considering the painting as a material product both of the physical landscapes it was made from and the processes of extraction and commodification it was made within.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned, performed and presented Europe, 2021-current

The sky was clearer in those days / On a clear day you can see for ever [ Episode 5 ] : a large-scale intermedial performance work, concluding the act of publicly dismantling and breaking down a used family salon car into its smallest possible elements – considering the car as a geophysically improbable place and object, and as an exemplar of the reach and interconnectedness it embodies, through the geographically diverse materials and processes gathered in its construction. This last of the work’s five distinct episodes collected everything that might find a new use or purpose, gave it away, and took a look at what remained.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned, performed and presented Chile and Europe, 2019-current

The sky was clearer in those days / On a clear day you can see for ever [ Episode 4 ] : a large-scale intermedial performance work, continuing and building upon the act of publicly dismantling and breaking down a used family car into its smallest possible elements – considering the car as a geophysically improbable place and object, and as an exemplar of the reach and interconnectedness it embodies, through the geographically diverse materials and processes gathered in its construction. This forth of the work’s five distinct episodes followed the dust that rises and settles from everything, and the remnants passed on, and never escaped.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned, performed and presented Chile and Europe, 2019-current

The sky was clearer in those days / On a clear day you can see for ever [ Episode 3 ] : a large-scale intermedial performance work, continuing and building upon the act of publicly dismantling and breaking down a used family car into its smallest possible elements – considering the car as a geophysically improbable place and object, and as an exemplar of the reach and interconnectedness it embodies, through the geographically diverse materials and processes gathered in its construction. This third of the work’s five distinct episodes imagined the human population as a force of nature, and the scale of geological forces and events that might begin to mirror our own.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned, performed and presented Chile and Europe, 2019-current

The sky was clearer in those days / On a clear day you can see for ever [ Episode 2 ] : a large-scale intermedial performance work, continuing and building upon the act of publicly dismantling and breaking down a used family car into its smallest possible elements – considering the car as a geophysically improbable place and object, and as an exemplar of the reach and interconnectedness it embodies, through the geographically diverse materials and processes gathered in its construction. This second of the work’s five distinct episodes looked up at the thin layer of atmosphere that surrounds the planet, and at how the things it picks up and blows around us define what we see.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned, performed and presented Chile and Europe, 2019-current

The sky was clearer in those days / On a clear day you can see for ever [ Episode 1 ] : a large-scale intermedial performance work, performing and building upon the act of publicly dismantling and breaking down a used family car into its smallest possible elements – considering the car as a geophysically improbable place and object, and as an exemplar of the reach and interconnectedness it embodies, through the geographically diverse materials and processes gathered in its construction. This first of the work’s five distinct episodes began with the final journey of one of the 1 billion cars estimated to be driving around the streets of the planet.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned, performed and presented Chile and Europe, 2019-current

quiet, too quiet, but not silent : a performed spatial sound work, providing a sequenced and reflective consideration of five disparate and inaccessible places on the planet’s surface – the ambient sound spaces of each imagined and reconstructed live, amongst and around the gathered crowd, using only a bag of forty pocket dictaphones and the collections of captured aural fragments they contain.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : commissioned and performed in Madrid, Spain, 2018

grey line [twilight] : an interventional public art work for live radio, tracking the twilight edge of the shifting shadow of night across the surface of the planet. The work followed the progress of one day’s sunset, and its passage, over a scattering of disparate and diverse locations across the earth, towards and over the broadcast’s host site in northern Spain. As this thin line of twilight slowly and relentlessly traveled around the world – from the Pacific, across Asia and the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa, to the Atlantic – Brookes and Casado periodically interrupted the day’s broadcast schedule to open a series of short live audio connections to people stood out on the earth’s surface. By offering temporarily access the microphones of their mobile phones, these individuals allowed listeners to eavesdrop onto whatever may or may not be audible around them, as daytime passed into night where they stood – in Nagoya, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kathmandu, Kuwait, Hebron, Athens, the host site in Donostia, and finally Bamako – as they stepped out into their own landscape to watch the shadow’s edge reach them.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : interventional live radio work : commissioned and broadcast Donostia / San Sebastian, Spain; performed internationally 2016.

carrying Rubén : on Wednesday May 25th 2016 Mike Brookes, Salut Bueno, Nazario Díaz, Amai Fernández, Axier and Joel carried Rubén Mateos Lima - a local performer with advanced multiple sclerosis – across the centre of the city of Bilbao. Twice. From 8pm, for an audience in Azkuna Zentroa Gallery space, Mike Brookes simultaneously constructed and presented possible versions of both journeys, in real time, from the available documentation. Mixing video and audio recordings from the first Journey with footage from the second couriered to him directly from the street. The intervention reconsidered the multi-site Pearson/Brookes work 'Carrying Lyn', fifteen years after its original performance in Cardiff in 2001, for the contemporary streets of central Bilbao.
Mike Brookes : performed action : commissioned and performed Biblao, Spain 2016.

Providence cove walk : participatory walk around a now absent shoreline. Accompanied by local residents, Brookes and Casado walked a specific route through the city centre streets and public spaces, that followed the now absent shore line of the original Providence Cove – an area of open water and salt marsh reclaimed and covered by the subsequent developments of downtown Providence. Realised within the 'Just a little bit of history repeating' series.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Providence, USA 2013.

historic parking lots of Providence / introduced birdsong : intervention in public space, highlighting thirty of the downtown Providence's surface level parking lots - identified as having been designated as parking lots, and having remained unchanged and in use as such, since at least the mid 1950s - by introducing purpose built motion triggered audio playback devices, containing the ambient sound of a singing bird, into all thirty lots simultaneously, for a single working day. Realised within the 'Just a little bit of history repeating' series.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Providence, USA 2013.

what if everything we know is wrong? : a performance and sound work for public space, using only fragments of captured sound, chalk drawing, and polaroid images for reference, in an attempt to reconstruct the aural environment of somewhere else, specific, within the otherwise empty space of a public event.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: Brown University Providence, Artium Vitoria, PACT Zollverien Essen, Pradillo Madrid, 2011-current.

just a little bit of history repeating [Euskalduna Shipyards] : intervention in public space, attempting to revisit fragments of the now absent shipyard buildings of the vast Euskalduna site in Bilbao, through the in situ personal descriptions of four ex-workers, of details and movements within the architecture and working days of those buildings.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Bilbao, Spain 2011.

one thing leads to another : intervention and durational object work, placing of a model cement town of 1500 individual small cement houses, some of which were burning.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Olot, Spain 2011.

just a little bit of history repeating [Alexandra Gardens Bandstand] : intervention and sound work, using localised FM broadcast to return music from the programme of the closing concert of the summer season of 1910 – a concert performed exactly one hundred years prior to the work' intervention – to the current arcade building that now occupies the site, and whose architecture mirrors both the structure and location of the original bandstand.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Weymouth, UK 2010.

dark FM : interventional sound and broadcast work. From dusk till dawn across a single night, a microphone and FM radio transmitter, located deep within an isolated forest, broadcast live and uninterrupted ambient sounds from its location out into the adjacent village of Pontós. The live audio broadcast opened access to aspects of the nearby yet otherwise inaccessible actuality of the forest, and was accessible to anyone within the village via their domestic or car radio. Initial work in the ‘Somewhere FM’ located broadcast series.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed MAPA Pontos, Spain 2008.

300 people and a bear / snapshot : action work, focusing the event of a large scale public meeting within an unlit clearing in a rural wood at midnight; to engage and reveal those present directly in the development of that event through their attempts to generate personal traces and mementos of it. Realised within the 'Something happening' series.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed MAPA Pontos, Spain 2008.

something burning / snapshot : action and durational image work, placing a burning chair to create a situation-specific event in public space; and to engage and reveal those present directly in the development of that event through their attempts to generate personal traces and mementos of it. Realised within the 'Something happening' series.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Rome, Italy 2008.

one small white house far away [with music] : a sculpural action, placing a standard touring bicyle, mounted on a training stand, and inviting spectators to mount the cycle and peddle to generates the power needed to animate the work for themselves; lighting a bulb that illuminates a small marble house in the the furthest corner of the room; and powering a radio, tuned to a local classical music station, placed directly on the floor adjacent to the bicycle. When their cycling stops the work returns to dark and silence.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : Academia de España en Roma, American Academy in Rome, PNRM Olot, Ultimisimos Ferrol, AHRC Living Landscapes Aberystwyth 2007-2009.

wellbeing / welfare : action work in public space, exploring models of human progress, developed as a participatory game over four consecutive days, through the manipulation of a large collection of various plastic toys. Initial work in the 'One thing leads to another' series.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado: commissioned and performed Polverigi, Italy 2008.

some things happen all at once : performance and durational object work, reflecting on human behaviour and sustainability, and built around the construction and decay of a model forest made entirely of ice. The model consists of 200 individual ice trees, and includes a village of 40 individual ice houses and a single ice church. This object work covers an area 3.5m in diameter, and is placed directly onto the floor of a public space. Heat generated by the presence and activity of any spectators hastens the decay of the ice, while attempts can be made to sustain the model using an improvised cooling system powered by bicycle. Additional cycles can be used to generate the power needed to animate other aspects of the work.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : performed Europe 2007-current.

the shape of error : performed action generating large scale graphic objects, within public space. Working on an advertising billboard, 4m above the ground, using household paints; a new image was completed over a five hour period, each day, for ten consecutive days. On completion, each image was labeled: 'the 1st error', 'the 2nd error', etc. With each image being reworked or obliterated by the work of the following day.
Mike Brookes : commissioned and performed Porsgrunn, Norway 2007.

paradise 2 [the incessant sound of a falling tree] : a performance and object work reflecting on tourism and migration, built around the placing of a model island made entirely of chocolate, and the completion of three main actions: [1] to define, in a pseudo scientific way, some concepts relating to trade and human displacement; [2] to draw the solar system in order to contextualise the journeys and locations described; [3] to eat all the trees on the island.
Mike Brookes and Rosa Casado : performed Europe, Australia, New Zealand, USA 2005-current.

two thousand gallons : a large scale gallery work, 'flooding' three rooms with 2000 gallons of fresh water in identical metal buckets: [1] 'six hundred gallons at five feet over eighteen weeks', [2] 'six hundred gallons at two and a half feet over eighteen weeks', and [3] 'eight hundred gallons at floor level over eighteen weeks'. Once installed the works are allowed to change character, through water stagnation and evaporation, across the eighteen week period of their exhibition.
Mike Brookes and Jill Greenhalgh : commissioned and exhibited Silkeborg Bad, Denmark 2002.

carrying Lyn : on Saturday June 2nd 2001 - the day of the Wales-Poland soccer international - Mike Brookes, Mike Pearson, John Rowley, Richard Morgan, Paul Jeff carried disabled performer Lyn Levett across the centre of the city of Cardiff. Twice. From 8pm, for an audience in Chapter's studio, Mike Brookes simultaneously constructed and presented possible versions of both journeys, in real time, from the available documentation. Mixing video and audio recordings from the first Journey with footage from the second couriered to him directly from the street.
Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson : performed action : commissioned and performed Cardiff, Wales 2001.

something burning [but it will turn out wrong] : durational object and action work, comprising of the controlled burning of a family saloon car, and the visual and aural documentation of that event. Initial work in the 'Something burning' series.
Mike Brookes : sculptural action : Wales 2000.

the last bus [of the millennium] : on 31st December 1999 Mike Brookes travelled the two hundred or so miles from his then home, on the west coast of Wales, to the house were he was born in the north of England, by public transport, arriving on the last available bus of the millennium. He carried an automatic pocket camera, and three rolls of black and white film. The resulting one hundred snapshots, snatched through shifting weather and dirty windows, record one possible version of that journey, and represent an attempt to reassert the daily and actual within the history and future mythology of the passing of the millennium.
Mike Brookes : performed action : UK 1999.