Live reading with photographic slide show, c. 40min; reworking in live form of residency project The Museum of Uninteresting Experience, which originally took the form of a site-specific installation.
The work is introduced as follows:
I’m going to show you some photos I took during some time I spent in Canada in the summer. While I was there, I kept a kind of diary, or journal. I’m going to read from four separate days of this journal.
Shortly after that I found myself at the quay. I wandered onto the pier, sat down on a bench, and then, for what I realised was the first time today, felt a bit bored.
The day had been ridiculously congenial so far: I’d managed to pass the time engaging in countless inconsequential activities, and a spirit of trivial curiosity had filled my being. In short, I was behaving like a tourist. But now, suddenly, I ran out of diversions, and was faced with reality itself.
This was much better.
For a few glorious minutes I was exactly where I wanted to be: in a state of utter disinterest and detachment from the world around me. I could feel the life draining out of my body, and an apathetic torpor invading my mind. The illusion that there was a purpose behind the walk had disappeared. The “going to buy a newspaper” narrative had long since run its course, and the cheerful diversionary triviality of acting like a tourist had been replaced by something more real, more honest and more mundane: boredom. Nothing around me interested me any more. I had nothing left to do, and I had no desire either to go and find something to do.
Then I decided to eat some biscuits.
The work was first staged at Centrum in Berlin in Nov 2013 as part of Sense and Non-Sense: A Festival of Absurdism by Matthew Crookes.
