Thomas Pellerey Grogan

Pollination

Performance (25') with custom-made body devices in collaboration with Georgina Hill

"Peeping through the looking glass", SET Lewisham, London (UK), 2021; “Projective Philosophies”, NSU, Roosta (EE) 2019; “Low Text”, Am Flutgraben, Berlin (GE), 2019

Dimensions: ‘Rig 1’: h.72 x w.33 x d.45 cm; ‘Rig 2’: h.68 x w.36 x d.40 cm
Materials: PVC tubes, paper, PVC coated galvanised wire rope, stainless steel, acrylic, vinyl prints, braided sleeves, smartphone, microphone, LED lamp

A fiction of a non-fictional paradigm, while performing a dialogue, two actors wear custom-made body rigs which live-stream their points of view and their “selfie” selves, as they enact a text based on reflections about individual and corporate modes of selling in the current Western financial market. YouTube videos related to the text are triggered via QR codes at stages of the live action. The two characters’ explore the alienation incurred as a result of the 4th industrial revolution and accelerated capitalist systems, in which labour is often invisible, as well as performing a type of communion - playing out the ambiguous nature of intimacy exploited and positively shared in the twenty-first century.

[G&T: scatter fake snow on the floor]

G: We were thinking two years ago about advertising, intimacy in consumerism, navigating the capital through objects and images promoting them.
T: The over documentation of the mundane is being capitalised as the amount of objects awkwardly displayed increases - constructing a landscape saturated by ‘dockless’ items.
G: Bikes you can throw in the river. Robots making me a salad
T: The disposal of branded visuals have become the logo of our epoch; the aesthetic of our current narrative.
G: Now yes, yet again, on the topic. What is peeling the eyelids, into the bowl?

[T: pour water into several glasses and gives one to G]

G: What do we want now, what do we deserve, who said it better? I am streaming the shit out of the subscriptions I am borrowing and hijacking. Pouring glasses at my legal house parties. I have found some paint for my home palace. With my cardboard packages on the daily.
T: A story that allows its characters to connect with each other via its own merchandise. A cabinet of ‘tailored’ curiosity that allows its characters to identify similar interests and dissatisfactions they have with each other in order to bridge intimacy.
G: Yep. Get me a ladder, baby. I am painting the walls.

[...]

[...]
[T: move to crowd]
[G: whispers stuff]

T: In this story, the currency is ‘intimacy’ and its characters trade it with each other and invest in each other. In most cases the investment process is a regretful and shameful experience.

[T: move back]
[G: stops whispering]
[...]

[...]
[G: hold glass]

G: A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello
T: In both scenarios, construction and consumption of intimacy, the speed at which they decide to go through these processes is done in more or less elegant ways, proportionally to the way they perceive certain dichotomies: Slow Food/Fast Food Pain/Gain Life/Death.
G: A RED STAMP.
If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

[T: starts to talk over G a little]
[...]