This is a spatial rumination provoked by Guest House as it evolved through rehearsal, in its guise as a work in progress, and in its duration as a performance. Far from being a consistent whole on which to base a coherent commentary, the process that is cited is fragmented in its attempt to give space to the ‘ungraspable real’ of the events that people our lives: the lives of the interviewees, the performers, the spectators, and you (us) as future witnesses of the CD-ROM.

1. An event could be a time of day, a place, a draft …

Bristol. It is ten thirty in the morning and I am beating my body, attempting to bring forward my destination as I make my way along the cobbled riverside walkway within an ‘urgency’ not to be late for the rehearsal. The warehouse building, broadly projecting itself at the end of the wharf, is finally tangible and I push through the glass doors/I am caught slipping through the glass into the modernist foyer/I am a body becoming the guest, the spectator and a witness. White washed walls, silver trimmings, cinema tickets, industrial doors, red carpet and slate floor. Immediately through the glass doors I am distracted by the early morning hubbub of the Arnolfini arts centre: a clattering of glasses from the café and the intonation of at least three voices in a mixing that is chopping and changing, pulling and distilling attention. 2. The fissure of irrational intervals – subjectivity is unhinged in the unfolding of these singularities. No longer that any body, I am instructed to two large white doors, doors that I have passed through on many occasions, over several years. This is the Rubicon to those experiences that have scarred my body with visceral traces – those reverberations that seemingly house my possession of many live art performances. The space beyond is not an empty space: I have been here before. And yet, whilst it is of course a space for time regained and experiences foretold there is more to it than that. 3. Flows, sequences, chains, series, processes, connections, and distributions: the continual vectors of singularities.

2. An event could be a time of day, a place, a draft … an urgency perhaps?

Facing Uninvited Guests at work – performers, white slats on wheels, projectors, computer screens – is to be continually distracted: there are no personal narratives to follow. We never know who any of these people are - the interviewees, the voices, the performers. Attention is in fact caught in this distraction, not lost, because this information doesn’t matter. As Deleuze says you don’t write with your ego, or your memory; rather "the act of writing is an attempt to make life something more than personal" (Deleuze 1995:143). If performance shares this quality then the work of Guest House plays explicitly upon the attempt to grasp this impersonal world. By looking beyond the verification of individual accounts of places and happenings – the actual experience of those who were there – the group sites the space between things. In their stutterings, evasions and uncertainties the performers give space to the virtual world of the event itself. An event here can be an hour or a few seconds; it can be a building like the Great Pyramid, or it can be a song; equally there can be several events cutting across each other at any one time. The event itself is like the force of a battle, it is a pre-individual, incorporeal and immanent spacing that hovers over its field as some ‘ungraspable real’ indifferent to the individuals that actualise it.

And so it is that the text of the performance and its architecture are folded out of the interview materials, the improvisations, the group dynamics, and the fictions inherent in trying to represent something that is impossible to grasp. This unstable text is then played out for us, the spectators, as if we were voyeurs to an investigation of a crime scene. Therefore the story is incomplete and the performance becomes the attempt to fill in the gaps. It is in these narrative openings that the impersonal force of the event begins to take hold; even the attempts at mere factual description begin to fold in on themselves:

INTERVIEWEE: […] something was happening …

INTERVIEWER: Do you know what was happening?

INTERVIEWEE: No, I don’t actually, do you know?

INTERVIEWER: Well, I think that […]

Why should the interviewer be expected to know? Or, is this a dialogue between the performers? Or, does this offer a clue to the event’s virtuality: that there are many perspectives to an event, and the many things that could have happened, that didn’t, are part of its potential and are real if not ever actual? An event is a vibration, Deleuze writes, with an infinity of harmonics; there are many frequencies with which to tune into its particular wave. The different extensions of sound and the varying intensity of conviction exhibited by the performers are all movements of the bandwidth. These are movements, which capture different takes of the same event. They show the uncertainty that inevitably exists in any one account, so "when time passes and takes the event away, there is always a meanwhile to restore the event" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:158). Therefore as spectators, we are witnessing a place where there isn’t one perspective on things but an unfolding of several perspectives. In this cautious 'agencing' of bodies, objects and events, apprehended in the material traces of the recording surface that is the human body, what remains of human agency is no more than a cadaver. Here it is the energy of the description, of the objects, and of the spacings that is to be put on show, not the people themselves. This is what it means to witness the event itself: "There is only the ‘there is’ – the event of the subject who experiences the event of the building" (Casey 1999:314).

Bristol, Arnolfini: Uninvited Guests are in the midst of their residency leading up to the first performance. So, slipping in with another perspective we start again: So, can you describe a room for me please? What are they being asked to describe? We have, after all, no means of verifying whether these places ever existed. I am reminded of something Henri Lefebvre wrote: "When we evoke ‘space’, we must immediately indicate what occupies that space and how it does so: the deployment of energy in relation to ‘points’ and within a time frame" (Lefebvre 1991:12). In this respect Guest House reverts this evocation - instead of staging what occupies the spaces described, Uninvited Guests show space itself as it gives room for certain occupations to take place.

3. The fissure of irrational intervals – subjectivity is unhinged in the unfolding of these singularities. The breakdown in dialogue, the repetitions, the shifts in sound and noise, and the irrational intervals in place as you move from one room to the next, all present the energy of space as fissures of creation. This is not a performance of a finished work; it is more a work of performance that gives space to that virtual realm of the event in order for various occupations to emerge. So it’s not a question of verifying places, but of showing what space gives place to. Accepting this, the computer-generated model of the house functions less as an architectural description of the rooms than as an architecture for ‘eventual’ space. This is architecture as "a writing of space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event" (Jacques Derrida, quoted in Casey 1999:314). The spectator finds the room, not as something complete and representable, but as somewhere between place and space. Here a room is that which makes room and clears space for things to happen. Philosophically, it acts as the chora, the impossible location where void and place merge in space in the room space furnishes (see Casey, p.87). These furnishings are the singularities of the event: the interactions of organic and nonorganic bodies emerging out of combinations of actions, passions, and circumstances that have no origin in the consciousness of the knowing subject. In searching for evidence of the event the performers interrogate these singularities in their attempt to trace out these rooms with the remembrances of the marks such happenings left behind: blood, photographs, footprints, fur coats, pieces of jigsaw, etc. This performance is therefore put in place and now awaits its own event: Guest House.

4. Flows, sequences, chains, series, processes, connections, and distributions: the continual vectors of singularities. As a spectator to Guest House we witness the sitings of, or clearings for, the ‘ungraspable real’. Seeing the performance unfold and this impossible house build is to witness an attempt to make these vague traces of an event conspire towards something informative, instructive and entertaining. I am hooked; I am hooked on the narrative of the performers trying to make a narrative, trying to make sense where ostensibly there is none: just sequences of interviews about disparate rooms, a series of objects, connections and lives now quite distributed. Michel De Certeau helps us place this performance on the map when he foresaw that "stories about places are makeshift things … composed with the world’s debris"; he thus wrote of this place where "things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves in the accepted framework" (De Certeau 1984:107). In this way, representing what appears on the surface, a direct representation of the lines of the interviewee’s text, does not give a worthy testimony of the event. So, in composing a show of spaces "everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning" (Ibid.), Uninvited Guests bear witness instead to the conditions that make an event possible by exposing and creating those details that come from elsewhere. In a final abstraction on the event Gilles Deleuze confirms our suspicions over the event’s whereabouts: "Events are produced in a chaos … but only under the conditions that a sort of screen intervenes" (Deleuze 1993:76). Guest House, as a performance piece, is made out of such interventions. These are the technologies of capture and the surfaces on which the traces are marked; there are the white slats, the computer imaging and the framing of the stage itself. These interventions work in another way too, they implicate you (the witness) into the process, they play with the limit of representation and they make you ask questions because you know there is always more than can be said. As such, as it is always intervening, the performance is a work in progress.

Can the performance go on and on intervening? Doesn’t the CD-ROM perpetuate this by offering up further screens for intervention? Do we not exhaust the case? Is it the futility in trying to capture the event as a graspable real that propagates the attempt? Is it the force of becoming a witness to a shard of evidence or another perspective hitherto uncovered? Or, is it desire, a desire that creates and gives room to other geographies more worthy of holding us as witnesses to this incorporeal and ‘ungraspable real’? This could go on and on, so in the meanwhile restore the event, plug into the recording surfaces of the CD-ROM and implicate yourself in the process of giving room to the ‘ungraspable real’. Think experientially of an inauguration of understanding in the very act of moving the avatar through the rooms provided; and have a sense of origin as occasion, as you witness this space cleared for the capture of the event itself.

Casey, Edward. The Fate of Place. London: University of California Press, 1999.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall. London:
University of California Press, 1984.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Athlone Press, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. What is Philosophy? London: Verso, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwells Publishers, 1991.