Glasfiguriner moment av arkitektur (2024)

site-specific performance 

Audience members were informed of an adress via e-mail after having signed up to the performance. Apart from the adress, exact time to appear at the adress and a door code, a PDF was attached with images and a hint of some sort of narrative, in the form of short poetic captions of the images. The images in turn showed locations near the actual place where the performance was taking place, but not revealing the exact place. Upon arriving to the adress with the door code leading into a staircase, a person was sitting on a bench reading a book, seemingly also waiting for the performance to start). At one point, the person started adressing the audience, stood up, and showed the way out to a courtyard (see images prior) where the seats for the audience were. The person also took a seat.

The two figures, or one, in Glasfiguriner moment av arkitektur appear (s) in front of the audience, seemingly waiting or looking for someone, talking to herself about where she ought to be, where she thought someone else would be, and philosophizing about her life, walking in and out through the different doors, gates, exits and entrances in the courtyard, also listing the different names of companies, law firms and skin care clinics that are tennants of the buildings.

Partly inspired by the character of Laura Wingfield in Tennesse Williams’ play

The Glass Menagerie (1944) who at one point in the play we discover has attended her education to become a machine- typist at a college, but instead has been wandering around, idling, taking walks, going to the cinema and the zoo et cetera.

Laura enacts a theatre within the theatre, critiquing capitalism, and performance by route of giving the impression she is doing something else and also performing the role of enacting the flaneur or filling in the blanks of urban everyday life in modern society. Her brother Tom, another character in the play, is a poet working at a factory, plagued by his predicament.

The semi-private courtyard that the work occurred at is only accessible via code and its rythms and daily activity is restricted to commercial, and mostly daytime- and appointment-based activities. Both performers and audience in a sense reenacted the un-utilitarian mode of being that Laura in Williams’ play embodies. Mimicing or involuntarily being part of the type of movement of the courtyard, along with blendning with the ongoing activities at the site.After leaving the audience, the person who had earlier adressed the audience gets up, and explains that she will go to the hotel next door. At this point, some audience members chose to leave and some chose to follow her to the hotel.

Curatorial text: Eve Madsen

Performed by Lovisa Erasmie, Liv Melin, Nina Kihlborg

Written and directed by Eugene Sundelius von Rosen

Costume assistance by Alba Rask