A Cargo of Questions
In the Peaceful Dome
Bluecoat, Liverpool 2017
The LODE Cargo of Questions published in the free leaflets for the installation and performances that took place in Liverpool and Hull in 1992, still has value and relevance today. Many of the themes and threads of interwoven connection resonate over the twenty-five year hiatus, partly because though everything has changed, the quality in the differences still generates powerful echoes.Listening to those echoes, and now in the echo-land of hyperlinks, new kinds of information wrap are able to help us understand what is happening elsewhere and is connected to what is happening here and NOW!
The video of Re:LODE A Cargo of Questions 2017 begins with the laying out of seven triangular canvas sails at the Yellow House in Oriel Mansions, Liverpool, sails that were used by the Yellow House to set out the LODE crates on the quayside in 1992. The performance of unloading included creating a representation of the LODE-line to mark out the twenty-two locations from where the cargo originated. You can see the Yellow House drawing the line and the locations on these canvases in the small clips of Super8 documentation from 1992 later on in this sequence and framing the recent opening and unpacking of the LODE cargo.
Documentation of the return of the crates to Yellow House is then followed by documentation of the opening of the crates by the Yellow House as part of the installation of Re:LODE. As each crate is opened in the video sequence a number of questions are raised relevant to the here, the there and the NOW! These sequences are then framed by the 1992 unloading performance, the installation of the cargo in the Bluecoat gallery and then the return of the cargo to the dockside.
The Video Screen in the Re:LODE installation showing A Cargo of Questions Re:LODE 2017 is positioned to the right of the Video Screen showing the video of LODE A Cargo of Questions 1992.
The juxtaposition of these two screens is intended to encourage connections that can be made between different times in different places. The diversity of these places and the people inhabiting these places, or passing through these places, adds to the significance that any recognition of possible links are revealing something that is more than the immediately apparent. Perhaps these potential patterns of recognition are, in fact, pointing to forces in the world that are real but not so easy to visualise.
This is why the contemporary information wrap is so important to Re:LODE. Pattern recognition is the key artistic tool for a socially based creation of a knowledge about the world, using words and using images and juxtaposing them to help reveal what it is that is happening in the present and to begin to see more clearly what the actual dynamics that shape our present realities are.
Reality is NOT a mass medium!
Reality exists only as the sum of the multiple realities that we experience!
We need to share these experiences to know the world!
The Posts on the Cargo of Questions blog will connect and contextualise these questions using everything that the contemporary communication environment can offer.
POSTS
In search of EUROPA - CEANN SLEIBHE The Western Shores
In search of EUROPA - CILL MHANTAIN Representation and Discrepancy
In search of EUROPA - FRIEDRICHSKOOG Times, Tides and Money at War with Politics
In search of EUROPA - LUBECK Freedom, Monopoly, Division, Trade
In search of EUROPA - LINKEN Boundaries, Borders and Barriers
In search of EUROPA - SCZECIN What Democracy needs? Nationality or Citizenship?
In search of EUROPA - FRIEDRICHSKOOG Times, Tides and Money at War with Politics
In search of EUROPA - LUBECK Freedom, Monopoly, Division, Trade
In search of EUROPA - LINKEN Boundaries, Borders and Barriers
In search of EUROPA - SCZECIN What Democracy needs? Nationality or Citizenship?
