On a clear day you can see for ever

‘On a clear day you can see for ever’ realised a new large-scale interventional live art work, publicly performed as a suite of multiple consecutive performance episodes, within the context of an major international contemporary performance programme and auditorium. The work was commissioned and produced by Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, and performed June 2022; with further exploration and consolidations being realised through the more intimate context and public events subsequently commissioned by Sismògraf in Olot, Spain, in April 2023.

The project builds on the authors’ longstanding research and expertise in located, multi-site and intermedial public art practices; as well their recent and ongoing research into the performance of place, performance as place, and the consideration and activation of extended and multiple scales place through performance. The resulting public performance event realised and presented significant further developments of the research and creative approached initiated through the related preparatory project work Brookes and Casado undertook in Chile and Spain across 2019 – culminating in the first exploratory presentation of aspects of this research, under the working title ‘The sky was clearer in those days’.

This project expanded and manifest the authors' proposal of the public dismantling of a used family car, into its smallest possible components, as the central and defining structural act of a public art work – a task that the authors and their collaborators then undertake over an intense week-long period, within a stripped out and reconfigured occupation of the host venue. Across this period the work is presented as a series of distinct large-scale public performance episodes, each offering a distinct phase of the car’s progressive deconstruction – and each using addition media and textual work to provide an additional frame and possible perspective onto the issues and connection revealed or arising through that act of deconstruction. The work is realised in collaboration with local mechanics, scrap workers, writers, sound and visual artists, and a cast of local young performers.

Research questions include:
How might established processes of artistic intervention and located performance begin to both address and perform their locale at multiple and expanded scales, to consider and reveal the wider landscapes and ecologies they act within?
How might a single artistic act or image be activated to reveal or operate within multiple scales of its location simultaneously?
In what ways might the disassembly of a modern human-made object, if broken down into all its separate components, begin to reveal the scale of spatial and temporal connections that were needed to bring it together?
In what ways might such an act of disassembly, done and presented publicly, expand our understanding of how much our daily actions and interactions increasingly blur the differences between what is local and what is global, and the extent to which things that happen in one place are also part of what is happening everywhere else?
How might an artistic event allow and enable direct and shared public encounters with such an expanded and expanding sense of place?