Victoria Stanton

Roadside Attractions (Toronto)

For PSi #16, I will present Roadside Attractions (Toronto), a 25-minute performative work that combines live narration with projected, looped video segments and repeated live, physical actions.

Arriving from another city, this piece employs a mini-residency structure, in which I conduct performance research by carrying out and documenting several micro-interventions in my new environment. Walking and visually mapping a variety of routes, these taped interventions are a record of recently located landmarks (or what I think of as flash landmarks) – the places that become my instant reference for orientation/navigation. Within a set time-frame (for example 4 days) I accumulate footage, review the images and then edit a short video. In the final instance a montage of the taped segments become a backdrop for the conference-performance: rhythmic repetitive actions (such as skipping in place) punctuated by inter-textual narration – reflections related to being a body moving through, responding, and connecting, to space, place, and ephemeral forms of architecture.

As negotiating public terrain is the central premise of this site-specific work, I focus on parallels between performance and travel, of extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory (Solnit, 2005, 5) while examining comprehensive states of performative consciousness, investing a performative presence within multiple spaces / times. This poetic form of investment is multi-faceted as well, as it potentially re-invigorates a landscape for those who inhabit it; public sculpture, local signage and even local businesses become the subjects (and objects) of reconsideration once they have been incorporated (and distilled) into a performative moment.

Seen in succession and placed in counterpoint to each other, the images and actions (both on and off-screen) come to visually embody a disjointed process of arriving while also proposing a strategy for Being. Here. Now.