Carrying Rubén

'Carrying Rubén' was a multi-site intervention and performance work for urban public space. The work was developed and presented in response to a public art commission produced by Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, Spain, for performance and exhibition within the venue's initial Prototipoak (Prototype) programme of international site-specific contemporary art in 2016. The work performed a context-specific reconstruction of the performance work 'Carrying Lyn' – initially conceived and performed by Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson, within their long-term collaboration as Pearson/Brookes, in Cardiff in 2001.

'Carrying Lyn' was a multi-site work defined by the act of carrying disabled transexual performer Lyn Levett across the centre of the city, while simultaneously presenting possible views of that act through the real-time assemble of fragments of documentation couriered directly from the street. The work involved: the inclusion of daily and low-grade technologies; the use of time as an organising dramaturgical principle in site work; collage dramaturgy, juxtaposing live and mediated documentation generated during the performance itself; and resulted in public performance occurring simultaneously at dispersed urban locations.

The project’s original research questions included:
- How might performance be constituted as a field of activity across an urban space rather than singular object of scrutiny?
- In what ways can the auditorium be rendered porous through the inclusion of mediated material recently generated elsewhere?
- How might documentation itself be folded back into the dramaturgy of performance?
- In what ways might multi-site performance problematise notions of presence, absence and live-ness in definitions of performance?

Fifteen years later, in collaboration with local performers and residents, 'Carrying Rubén' reperformed and reconsidered the propositions and structure of this pivotal performance work within the contemporary streets of central Bilbao and the gallery space of Azkuna Zentroa, and within contemporaneous considerations of site-specific and intermedial live art. The work was performed across the opening day of Prototipoak 2016, and it's mediated traces subsequently exhibited as part of the group exhibition of participating international artists that ran in parallel to the festival programme as a whole.