Helen & Gwenneth's first update

Dear All,
We would like to give you an update on our process:

The two of us have been emailing and skyping over the past months, currently 10-20 times a week. As a starting point we discussed previous works, made both inside and outside our collaboration, that are somehow related to the kind of approach and conceptual concerns we are forming. We've been talking a lot about a project (titled Choreography) we began last time Gwenneth was in Melbourne in 2006, of which there are now two versions. We showed the latter version last year in a big project space at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, enabling us to be specific and ambitious with the installation - which has become integral to this work. Installed as such, the work has become a point of departure into extended experiments and discussions. We plan to make a new work following this process and perhaps similar in mechanisms.

There are a few matters we can distil from our collaboration and that we would like to address in a new work for We Are Hidden …: the conditions and mechanisms of spectatorship, visuality and space, dialogue and the use of a transparent medium or apparatus. All points mentioned are related to a bodily observation and experience. Photography and choreography have been initial and key tools so far and have inspired the dialogue between us. We thought about using other media and methods now, perhaps revisiting previous performance and installation works from a different angle. Now that we sink into the process, we are more and more focused on what conceptually will function most strongly. We are beginning the process with experiments in photographic installation, but are open to the possibility that the process may arrive somewhere else. There is quite a degree of unknown - and this is very exciting.

(If anyone would like to see the large installation version of Choreography its on Gwen's site: Il faut.nl)