Biennale 37,000 – Toyah Webb

Biennale 37,000

Chorus A: Welcome! Please be careful not to breathe too deeply

Chorus B: Hundreds of these images have been categorized!

Chorus A: And market value has been assessed!

(The chorus of Fungal Lesions enters from stage left. They move like contemporary dancers made entirely of fingers. Each Fungal Lesion finds a coccolithophorid to cling to, creating a lattice of black and white bio-matter. The doubled chorus of coccolithophorids fall silent. A video of a fire is projected on the rear wall of the stage)

C.: (offstage) Flames crawl on a loop and new morphology seeps out. Hardening into 32,000-year-old bone shards that will be catalogued and measured according to space.

(Each guest is given a piece of the alphabet sealed in plant resin by a silent coccolithophorid)

C.: I feel the touch of a hand checking for air shifts. Checking for glacial scars in every reiteration of geology.

(The guests are invited to dust their faces with iron oxide)

Chorus A: They whisper

Chorus B: ‘This is Art’

Chorus A: ‘This has Meaning’

(The guests are then given novelty martini glasses. The plastic necks curls into the glass-base and shoot outward at a 120-degree angle, so the whole glass is a straw. Ice-clinks)

C.: A quadruped is painted on another wall like my own, pixels pre-dating cinema by 31,902 years.

(The Fungal Lesions detach themselves, and usher the guests into a half-circle around the plinth. Lights down)

(The fire on the rear wall of the stage is replaced by the vacant square of the projector’s screen, and Donna Haraway is beamed in via Skype. The stage is bathed in green light, all the way from California. Haraway is wrapped in a cow-hide and wears brown plastic antlers)

Donna Haraway: Once there was a man and a sun-like woman who lived together in a large house. Every morning the woman would walk in the fields around the house, unaware that she stepped surreptitiously. However, one morning – after many mornings – she stopped and listened and heard: a roar on the other side of the field.

Upon hearing the sound the woman is

She realises that the only thing to do is to remove her Human-Shirt and collapse
a difference. So that night, the woman transforms.

They build a cardboard shell to become larger, and paint a white stripe down the centre of the face. They apply a thick coat of mascara and leave the house. It is difficult to move because the new body forces them to crawl on all fours. When they arrive at the field, they wait.

Baba: (climbing) This Virtual Cave Experience is an exact copy of the original. We assembled a team of artists, scientists, archaeologists, geologists. We shot 6,000 photos and laser scanned every fissure. The result is fabulously sci-fi

Chorus:

Baba: (climbing) The walls are sculpted from resin and fibreglass, laid over a steel skeleton we suspended in the hangar

Chorus:

Baba: (climbing) If you look closely, you’ll notice ‘quartz’ deposits in the ‘stalagmites’ and ‘fossils’ in the ‘limestone’ floor

Chorus:

Baba: (climbing) Every geological mark has been repeated. Even the temperature has been designed to replicate the humidity of the original

Chorus:

Baba: (climbing) Overall, we wanted to create a setting that was soft and intimate, that truly captured history

Chorus:

Baba: (climbing) And the prices are cheap: €13 doesn’t seem much to time-travel to the dawn of civilisation!

(Baba reaches the top of the ladder and the guests of C. applaud. Lights down)