In the summer of 2011 we organised a performance sculpture, Existere, that relied on a huge collaboration of volunteer participants from all over England and Europe. The experience had a deep impact on us. We were left with the feeling that the process of the performance had come to embody the work’s concept itself and that we had inadvertently endured the notions of uncertainty, through performing, that were implicit to the original concept.
This idea and experience of uncertainty has led us to discuss the reality of ‘choice’. At the same time as be- ing artists / directors for Existere we were also performers. Once the performances began we were forced to surrender our control of the work, in other words we chose to submit ourselves to the uncertain events that followed. But does this concept of choice exist, or do we tunnel through existence only engaging with a predetermined reality and set of choices.
We now ask ourselves where choice begins and ends, and whether it exists at all. We propose an installation piece for FAP that will situate the individual at the heart of these questions. By reducing a visible world to a featureless space, the visitor is offered nothing for the eye. Instead he is left with a heightened awareness of his own sense of being. By choosing to enter the space the visitor becomes the performer and the subject of the installation.
