______ aftermath

with Duncan Speakman

Fri 3 Feb 2006, 2pm-8pm
Inbetween Time 2005, Arnolfini, Bristol
www.arnolfini.org.uk/ibt/

This is available for future performance.

Trained by a TV make-up artist, we lovingly fabricate bloody wounds on each other’s bodies. Clothing is cut away, not to tend to an injury, but to create a fake wound and apply the blood that would have run from it. Over 6 hours these fake cuts multiply and proliferate across our skins. We become surfaces marked by real and on-screen violence, that has happened or is yet to happen, both a living memorial and a warning of what might be to come. In Aftermath, tenderness produces cruel effects, and fake gashes carry the memory of their careful creation. In the room with us, you share in the intimate eroticism of wounds, getting up close and personal, confronting your desire both to look and look away. The immersive and visceral soundtrack is produced live, by sampling the performers’ internal body sounds. The wounds begin to migrate from the performers onto the surfaces of the room, and are offered to you to take away with you on your skin, out into the real world. Likewise you will be invited to hold a stethoscope to your body, to contribute the rustles and murmurs of your blood-flow to the live score.

Aftermath pushes at the limits of aesthetic taste, to question the ethics of the pleasure we take in both documentary reports and movies that fetishise violence. We perform fake suffering for you, atoning for the cultural commodification of pain, the visual pleasures taken collectively in images of accidents and violence.

Stay with us for as long as you like. Witness as much or little as you want. Feel free to sit or stand where you choose, to come and go.

This is the durational sequel to Uninvited Guests’ Schlock, which toured nationally in 2004-5.

Download touring information pack here.