JULIEANNA PRESTON

Preston, Julieanna. murus [performance video], Body-building Online Exhibition held by Performa 2020c urated by Charles Aubin (Performa, New York) and Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, (ArkDes, Stockholm): https://performa-arts.org/bodybuilding.

Performa presents Bodybuilding, a free online exhibition that examines the use of live performance by architects, charting a multigenerational lineage of designers and studios who have made architecture out of actions. The exhibition takes place on Radical Broadcast, the organization’s online broadcast channel at performa-arts.org.

The central question of Bodybuilding is: What happens when performance enters the world of architecture? For architects, performance can be a method for designing, a tool to transform users’ experiences, or an instrument of critique. In every case, performance is a blade that cuts into the matter of architecture. It slashes architecture open, but it can also reshape it.

An act of care against the politicization of a wall, the performance murmur considered the “stalwart body” of a medieval edifice at Newcastle University as something that might be nursed, gently awakened, embraced, and read to, rather than made to enforce partition and exclusion. Murmur was the culmination of Julieanna Preston’s residency at the British institution, during which the New Zealand architect solicited the expertise of local historians, architects, poets, and builders in a process of exchange that extended to her cultivation of participants; murus is the video installation resulting from the live events. Thirteen people responded to her invitation to attend to an area of the Morden Tower wall. A site of poetry readings since the 1960s, the thirteenth-century monument had already been adopted as a cultural landmark. Its wall had lived a life steeped in spoken words, and so her preparations began with reading some familiar ones. “Play with elocution,” Preston’s brief encouraged. The performance was a kind of recitation, bedtime stories about the wall, performed for its benefit. Wakefulness and rest framed two sessions coinciding with sunrise and sunset, during which time Preston and her volunteer caretakers would press their bodies into the wall’s cracks, stroke its weathered façades, and speak to its stones in chants, whispers, and shouts. White cotton hankies (provided to them in a packet that also contained charcoal rubbings of the wall) were among the resources furnished for this decidedly intimate act. Video and sound recordings of the performance show figures dusting and crooning, pressing themselves into the wall’s seams and depressions: small entry points for the body, something equally fragile.