We decided to meet up and discuss the logistics and meaning of our piece, writing everything down in an attempt to be fully clear, as individuals, on our roles and the meanings behind them. We realised when doing this that we were over-complicating our piece; we needed to strip it back to our original idea. Whilst we were simplifying our overall piece, we found it hard to plot out what each person would be doing at what point, so we decided to focus exclusively on the idea of growth – growth of ideas, growth of confidence, growth of voice.
Whilst remaining with the idea of watering each placard to nurture the ideas and make them bloom, we decided it would be a good idea to show this growth in some way throughout the duration of the piece. One person at a time would be given this task and then would rotate when everyone’s task changed over. The person responsible would walk to a filled plant pot and begin to draw chalk roots on the floor. These roots would eventually fill the space around one plant pot, at which point whoever drawing them would move on to another plant pot. Each time the artists rotate, the roots would be drawn longer and around more plant pots as they were filled, creating and interweaving map of thought and growth. The lack of permanence around this idea echoes the entire piece; the roots will be washed away with the rain (if this is the case in the performance, the artist starts over), much like how the cardboard would wilt and the writing would run. This element of temporality emulates the life cycle of plants: they grow, they are nurtured, they wither, they die. However, the ideas on the placards remain. Once they are revealed to the world, they cannot be removed.
Continuing with this idea of growth and nurturing, we decided to incorporate the ‘destroyed’ answers into this natural cycle. Using a hand-powered shredder, we will shred the ‘destroy’ answers into strips of paper, and it will be one artists’ job to turn that paper into compost. They will travel around each filled plant pot and mix the paper in with the soil using their hands. This raw, ritualistic-style action adds another layer of nature to our piece, and shows that all ideas can fuel the desire for protest and change.
As a group, we also made a big decision regarding the audience of our piece. We decided to bring our work closer to that of our main influence, Adrian Howells, and make the piece a one-to-one experience. One at a time, an audience-participant would come up to the table, sit, and make eye contact. At which point, the artist sat at the table would produce a piece of paper with the first set of instructions on it; the audience-participant reads it; they make eye contact; they are handed the question and paper/pen; they write; they are given the last set of instructions; they are given a card; they put their answer into one of the two boxes; they leave; the next person sits down. And so on. This one-to-one experience gives the piece a much more personal feel, and delivers the idea we strived to achieve of making the audience feel connected to the piece in a deeper way, which allows them to give much more honest answers. By giving a one-t0-one experience, the audience-participant feels valued and are given time away from their lives for a couple of minutes to engage in collective catharsis, just as Adrian Howells does in many of his pieces. The idea of non-verbal conversations that Howells and Dee Heddon talk about is also present in our piece through the use of eye contact – not only does our lack of speech and purely aural communication tell the audience we are taking a step back (this is not about us, but about them), but allows them to search deeper into themselves via an intimate experience.
We went out into Speaker’s Corner to experiment with the placards and work out the logistics of them. We also wanted to find out, by using just one placard, whether people stopped to read it. We placed the placard in the centre of the square, and covertly sat on a bench on the other side.
We realised that the placards were rather unstable in the wind as it often fell over. We believe to counteract this, we need larger (deeper) buckets with a brick in the bottom of each to keep them weighted.
In terms of a reaction, most people who walked by reacted to the placard in some way. Most simply glanced at it, but some did stop to read it. When people walked by us in groups, we realised we’d created a talking point; people were answering the question, whether they knew it or not. They were talking about it to each other and giving answers without even realising. Most of the conversations we over heard suggested people were confused by the placard, and mainly believed that they had very little power at all.