Repository
2002-3
Cast glycerin, cast salt, paper bags;
spoken and recorded text by Zofia Burr;
movement scored and directed by Julia Mayer
Installation dimensions variable;
chair 32.5 x 16.5 x 17.5''

Slides 1-5:
Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL

Click to Read Selected Poetry by Zofia Burr
Click to Read Complete Text by Zofia Burr

This collaborative performance installation, premiered in June of 2002 at Artemisia in Chicago, and was recreated in February of 2003 at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (UICA) in Grand Rapids. At both venues, Repository became an opportunity for Chicago based dancer/choreographer Julia Mayer, D.C. based writer Zofia Burr and myself to work together as a collaborative of three to create new work on the complexities of maternal identity and experience.

In the center of Artemisia’s main gallery, several hundred bright white salt cast lunch bags surrounded and supported three chairs cast in amber colored glycerin soap. The bags piled up in heaps on the floor under and around the chairs, lifting them off their feet as in a flood. The image suggested to me the vulnerable tenacity of mothers and children in their predicament between the wild and the social.  In conversation with
me and with each other, Zofia and Julia generated
poetic and choreographic ideas that layered images
and interpretations.

Starting with the variety of meanings attached to salt and repository, Zofia wrote her poetry by moving around collected references, cutting and pasting them into groups of associations. Working with the dynamic of hide and seek, whispered childhood admonitions, and plain brown paper lunch bags, Julia devised a movement score that gave performers the opportunity to play, and to experience the friction between the wild domain of children, and the rational language-based realm of the adult.  For opening night, local performers (eight at Artemisia, five at UICA) improvised around the rehearsed directives of Julia’s score. Zofia, Julia and I read Zofia’s thirty minutes of text as partner to the movement, offering rhythm and narrative.  Throughout the run of both exhibitions, Burr's recorded voice continued to speak, extending the metaphors carried by the sculptural installation.  At Artemisia, the recording also accompanied pairs of performers who improvised according to Julia’s score daily from 4 to 5pm.

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