Our performance, Mapping The Lost City, takes our audience members through our exhibition of which we have curated through lost, broken and abandoned objects left in the streets of Lincoln. Assisted by the use of audio, the audience themselves attempt to document the city by mapping the gallery space in the Usher Gardens. The soundscapes that aid the performance consists of snippets of Paul Auster’s text, The New York Trilogy, and the sounds of Lincoln’s streets which were recorded in the route of which we found a majority of our objects.
Our exhibition is not an extension of the gallery space; it is a response to the site and reacts against the norms of housing art. Essentially we have created an anti-gallery space in which audience are not restricted in taking photographs of the art, but invited to do so. Furthermore, by holding an exchange we are providing visitors the chance to take our pieces of art as long as they replace it with something of their own possession. We are also curating our work in front of audience members in the morning which never occurs in a regular gallery setting.
Many of the pieces within the Usher gallery suggest our central theme that art can be anything when placed and curated in the right manner. For example, the grand chandelier made of broken parts of plastic perfectly embodies the objectives of our performance which challenges artistic practice.