The Watchers
| March 1, 2010 | to | May 1, 2010 |
spring 2010 - exact dates to be anounced
The watchers is a new media performance project by Martin Butler / The Liminal Institute in collaboration with Mediamatic.
Loosely inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s, “Rear Window”, six performances are played out in the six appartments in one building, using new infra red optical technology designed by Marc Boon and Mediamatic, the public are able to watch and listen to the performances from outside.
Each performance will have a very different content and character, but will be created in such a way that all the narratives and dramaturgical lines join together, the public can choice to watch only one work but as they view from window to window a bigger story unfolds.
The performances stem from butler’s fascination with the private and public sphere and how rules and personality differ from each… The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems. It is “a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment.”
The public sphere can be seen as “a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk”and “a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed”.
The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the public sphere. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are family and home. Martin Heidegger argues that it is only in the private sphere that one can be one’s authentic self. butler intention is to expose the “theatre” of the private sphere.
Living in milan in a few months this year butler lived on a typical italian courtyard with the windows and balconies facing directly each other. Opposite in the building lived a fashion model, tall and beautiful, to the outside world extremely successful and an image of female inspiration, every night when she locked the doors of her appartment, she would rock and pull out her hair.. .. A middle aged married couple, successful, wealthy, having everything but they haven’t spoke to each other in years, what keeps them together. To the outside world a perfect couple, but inside a shadow of they public selves. The fantasist or role player.. creating another world for himself, totally removed the real world, he closes the door and becomes someone else… The migrant family at home living only in a world one street away from where the mother was born. The young business men,… In another appartment an old lady lives, she hasn’t left the appartment for years, with the occassional visitor to bring food and to clean, her isolation is reconciled by the stories that she creates by looking out of her window, living her life through the stories being told in the windows of others.
The stories told could be many.