2010
Unhinged (Lisbon), 2010
6-hour performance for To Serve / A House Without a Maid, a project by Simone Aughterlony and Jorge León
and
Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Photo: Tim Etchells
Unhinged (Brussels), 2010
6-hour performance for To Serve / A House Without a Maid, a project by Simone Aughterlony and Jorge León
and
Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Photo: Hugo Glendinning | Mathilde Maillard | Tim Etchells
—
In this durational performance, a performer spends 6 hours holding a door that has been removed from its frame, moving around the parlour rooms of a historical mansion as a woman-door hybrid. With its titular gesture to madness, Unhinged merges body and object into a single unit, collapsing the normative of both the body and the domestic. The customary utility of the door vanishes when it leaves its place in the door frame, while the body’s relationship to space is reconfigured by the flattening of its ‘front’ against the solid surface of the door. The object becomes an additional body part, as well as a burden, functioning both as the performer’s partner and an impediment. As she simultaneously enacts ‘wearing a door’ and ‘being a door,’ the performer’s capacities for movement and vision become compromised, making her plight both comical and disconcerting.
Unhinged brings to the fore the role of a service worker and more broadly of women in the context of a home, while also inviting us to consider the function and the physical structure of the domestic space itself. The door stands as a powerful player in the context of a home – a guard of solitude and privacy, a barrier from intruders, an invitation for entrance. By displacing it from its normative place and function, Unhinged draws attention to the ways in which the built environment might sanction movement and agency, especially pertaining to women. The movement of the mobile door-woman perceptually partitions the space, suggesting new spatial divisions where no tangible walls exist, as well as creating additional imagined entrances/exits. The door is here lifted from its role of invisible facilitator and servant of domestic traffic to a new zone of visibility, play, and problematic agency. As the inanimate object acquires provisional autonomy and mobility via its attachment to the body, the performer’s own mobility becomes a problem, as her body effectively becomes seen as part of the architecture of the home.
Presentation history:
Unhinged (Brussels), 2010. Premiered at Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Brussels, Belgium.
Unhinged (Lisbon), 2011. Alkantara festival. Lisbon, Portugal.
Unhinged (Berlin), 2011. Tanz im August festival. Berlin, Germany.
Unhinged (Bern), 2011. Biennale Bern. Bern, Switzerland.
Unhinged (Rotterdam), 2011. Internationale Keuze festival. Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Unhinged (Zurich), 2011. Theaterhaus Gessnerallee. Zurich, Switzerland.
Press:
Performance Research Journal 17.1: On Failure (link). Edited by Margaret Werry and Roisin O’Gorman. Taylor & Francis, 2012. ISSN: 1352-8165. Cover image and artist pages.
