Lydia Beily
Collaborating with Emily Goodwin, a performance artist and costume maker, and adopting the methodology of the flâneuse, we centralised a form of urban wandering alert and attuned to the hidden corners and edges of the city. Through this process of perambulation, we surveyed a number of intriguing spaces within Lichtenberg, where we planned to stage performative interventions that would be captured on 16mm film, and might distil a sense of our psychogeographical investigations of presence, memory and place. Through the fortuitous discovery of an apartment block designed by the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer, and following further research into his dynamic performances, we were inspired to create a series of bodily sculptural forms that would operate in visual dialogue with his Triadic Ballet piece. Emily crafted brightly coloured conical forms to sheath her arms, a headpiece, corrugated neck ruff and fanned ankle cuffs, all using found, recycled or repurposed materials. These adornments restricted her regular range of movements, which led us to consider the costume elements as a form of wearable sculpture, offering occasion to experiment with alternative motions, gestures and forms of physical expression. These movements operated in
improvisatory response to the streets, parklands, architectural details and transport intersections we moved across and through within Lichtenberg. The Bolex camera also became a vibrant participant in this spontaneous urban choreographic conversation, and I operated the apparatus as a responsive physical extension of my own body and in reply to these constantly shifting atmospheric elements.
These micro performances constituted a form of live and contemporary archive making that both activated the unseen traces and layers of presence latent in the geographical fabric of Lichtenberg, and invited the community to participate, observe or involve themselves in whatever way they wished. Often, the very vision of us moving through the streets in vibrant costume and with analogue camera apparatus, inspired curious members of the public to pause and observe, or to engage us in enthusiastic conversation about what we were working on and how it related to the
neighbourhood. These conversations often led to words of encouragement or suggestions of interesting locations we might wish to explore, and one resident even invited us to utilise his vintage open-top fire department van as a shooting location.
Now, back in Scotland the rolls of 16mm film have finally returned from the lab, and as we project them, those resonant moments in Berlin are illuminated once again. The next phase of the project is to weave these vignettes and fragments together with the field recordings we made, in order to create a Dada film collage charting our playful explorations that will be titled, Lichtenberg Triadic Echoes.
