Making Making Matter

A series of performances and performance-lectures 2013-2015, London and Helsinki, with Emily Orley which address the question of how to make the matter of making matter, so that it matters to you as much as to me. So that it matters to the Academy. So that what is made (matter), even if it is unmade, matters as research.

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When we first performed, at the 3rd International Colloquium on Artistic Research in Performing Arts at the Helsinki Theatre Academy, we drew on the fact that the building used to be a soap factory (Kokos Oy). We scrubbed our hands, arms and faces with soap until the bar of soap disintegrated, making ourselves clean but leaving us with nothing more to show for it. We experimented with the making of a dialogue (with words, with paper, with clean hands), while dissolving matter (soap). In later versions of the performances we explored the materiality of the paper we read and write on, examining how it is made, and in doing so questioning the hegemony of textualism and the pressure we are all under in the Academy to produce evermore outputs.