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Container or music series
A Space without a Use
Wellington 2017
Claudia Kappenberg
Can you imagine a space which serves for nothing and relates to nothing? This project proposes such a space, a room without use or necessity.
A garden gnome will guard the space and welcome the visitors. Small buckets filled to the brim with water will be given to those who want to enter the space, the precarious load slowing down their rhythms and suspending habits.
The work draws on George Perec’s writing in Species of Spaces and other Places (2008), in which he considers the possibility of a space without a use. Uselessness, traditionally associated with failure and waste, here constitutes an alternative to the ubiquitous modern credo of productivity and purpose. Uselessness is claimed as that which renders us more human.
Claudia Kappenberg is a performance and media artist, as well as founding editor of The International Journal of Screendance. She lectures at the University of Brighton, UK and has published widely on performance and screen-based work, including in Anarchic Dance (Routledge, 2006), The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (2010), Art in Motion (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) and the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies (Oxford University Press 2016). Her performance practice consists of minimal choreographies which have been shown across Europe, the US and the Middle East in the form of live interventions, gallery-based performances and screen-based installations.
Presented by International Programme Partner Bolton Hotel
