Thoughts on the Stairs Residency
2020

During the first COVID19 lockdown in the UK in May-June 2020, I was one of the artists in residence in a 6-week online residency for A4 Arts Foundation in South Africa. With the 3 other artists, Ofri Cnaani, Nolan Dennis and Josh Ginsburg we explored the internet as a studio, ‘as material’, as a structure to play with. For one of the sharing sessions in ‘playing with the material of the internet’, I experimented with freezing in the frame as performance, experimented with physical theatre games online with the group, and created a ‘cursory mask’. All of which attempted to bring our attention, our awareness to the material of the internet, of the computer. The trickster, the fool plays with the materials around them to reveal the very structures at play:
‘Where situations seem to be locking into fixed positions, the fool uses the device of play, in both senses; trying out what fiction and imagination might achieve and looking for any signs of play, that is movement in the materials presented to him. He, more than other members of his species, experiences the world as a constant process of flux, of becoming rather than being […]’ (Prentki, 2012, p.4).







