Re: Incident On and Off

The practice-as-research performance ‘Re: Incident On & Off’, commissioned as part of ‘Liverpool Live’ (the performance component of the 2006 Liverpool International Biennale), was concerned with notions and practices of shifting geographies. Although the site of Gee’s Bathroom shop on Hanover Street in Liverpool (the location of the performance) was fixed, it also occupied an unstable, shifting geographical status. In a city undergoing a significant amount of regeneration, the abandoned shop location was due for demolition; thus it was approached as a site in transit.

As live performers Whalley and Miller only became physically present after dark, remaining absent from the space during daylight hours. During the day, the piece consisted of visual/textual material occupying three monitors located in the window of the shop. These monitors showed pre-recorded and looped material that was developed over the course of, and in relation to, the three-day installation. The work on the monitors was video only and without any audio element, thus functioning as a discrete object engaging with those audiences outside the space rather than those occupying it during the day.

Whalley and Miller’s dwelling in the shop window for a duration of forty hours (two nights of 13 hours, one night of 14 hours) aimed to navigate the tension between the apparent fixity of ‘home’ and the attendant fluidity/unpredictability of ‘away’. Effectively, they were endeavouring to test the limits of these distinctions and explore the ways in which their understanding of the concept of site-specificity develops in the oscillation between the absent, static idea of home (‘you are here’) and its mobile, mutable corollary (‘you are no longer there’).