The Beijing Tour of All Tours: Video Documentation

 

There is not a great deal of video documentation of The Tour of All Tours: you had to be there to see it, basically. But, over time, some bits and pieces do come together and this is one of those. This video was made for the exhibition On Holiday (CEAC Xiamen 2022) which took critical tourism and performance as its basis. The Beijing tour was reconstructed as a video for the exhibition and here, now, is that video. 

One of the things that is quite obvious is the gap between text and image. This is the result of filming the tour five years after it was made. Five years is a long time in Beijing and many changes had taken place. This gap is not so much a problem as another layer and point of interest, as far as I see it.

One of the biggest changes is that the organization that commissioned and hosted the tour, Bookworm, had left Sanlitun. There was, therefore, an element of nostalgia for the recent past.  

 

An Aquatic Themed Tour of Reclamation Street, Hong Kong

 

Reclamation Street on the Kowloon Peninsula is built on land extended into the sea and runs about one mile north to south. This performance involved walking from the southern end of the street to the northern end of it obeying one basic rule. This rule was to stop in every shop that sold water, to buy a bottle and to then empty it over yourself. I did this and very wet I quickly became, I was wet to the skin as I popped into small stores in search of yet more water. The plastic bottles were collected and deposited at the recycling centre at the northern end of the street.

The Golden Tour of Nantougucheng Shenzhen - video

The full-length video is now here of a tour that very nearly didn't happen. This one was destined to be stopped like the tour of Shanghai but I somehow managed to make it through with a rough video before getting stopped by the guards. They messed up the sound so it's been re-recorded but that doesn't change the basic premise of the tour. Conflicting information from official sources, kitsch music, too much enthusiasm and a place that doesn't really want the tour. 

I have tried to model it on every awful tour you've taken before and then make it worse still, but in a deliberate way. The references will be a bit lost on most people, it helps to know the history of Shenzhen and Hong Kong to read this one, but there's plenty else going on. Not sure where to hot next with a Golden Tour but I do have one or two candidates brewing. The thing that strikes me looking at it now, however, is whether it would be better to dispense with the audience altogether and just make it as a video. It might be easier to do these that way.

Precarious Office: a climate refugee from the future

Precarious Office was a promenade performance that took place earlier this year in Macau. I designed a walking route through the city which started on the southern shoreline, passed through the city centre and arrived at the gallery, Ox Warehouse, who were supporting the artistic residency. 

The starting point was notable as it was off limits: a small patch of trees sunk into the coastal mud, the remains of a mangrove forest which had been cut down to make way for land reclamation. It was here that I was smeared in mud. The smell was ripe; this was salty sea mud and sand. I had to climb over a fence to get down to the beach and this provided the first obstacle of the show: lifting office furniture over this fence then pulling myself over it too.

The route took me through a flat reclaimed area of land which casinos and banks have now colonised, then up a public elevator to the older part of the city. The reactions of passers by were an integral part of the work and there was no shortage of these. In a way the people glued to their phones oblivious to what was going on are just as interesting too. All hell could break loose, but as long as it didn't get between them and their phone, it would be irrelevant.

The performance was given with no explanation, it simply consisted of a tall, western looking man, covered in mud and struggling with office furniture to cross the city. I quite wanted to let the image be itself and not surround it with a story or set of expectations. 

That's not to say I didn't have any intentions or designed it by chance. I have seen many videos and news reports lately of people fleeing flooded homes. I wanted to make this an office space, however, to emphasize the spirit of blind industry that is in no small part playing its role in shaping our current climate crisis. The image had to be kept normal, however, as if this were a routine situation, something that goes without mention.  

The heat, duration and resistance of the materials made this quite a difficult performance. I was in no way acting tired, I genuinely was exhausted and had to use my full energy to make it across the city. It was humid, hot, the plastic started to hurt the skin, the wheels didn't enjoy the bumpy pavement. It was a proper test.

Having arrived at the gallery, the office equipment was then displayed as part of the exhibition with the full length video of its transport playing on the screen. This gave the objects a greater significance, they were not just props for a performance but an integral part of the exhibition. What's more, the sound was edited so that the sound of the office chair rolling over mock historic cobbles was privileged. This was to draw attention to performance like quality of this recently constructed history and to reduce other sounds so that this video could combine more effectively with the other works in the audio space of the exhibition.