Performance | The Activation Map

Performance

Talking Stick Cabaret

February 9, 2001
Exhibition, Performance
This performance by Alberto Friggo employs a format he has been exploring recently. In these demonstrations he videos an action and then interacts with the recording. In this performance Friggo will lead the spectator in the making of gnocchi, potato pasta. While this preparation is recorded, it is replayed while the audience consumes the pasta. The final work is the two videos; one of the preparation and another of the consumption that is played side by side on monitors.

November 17, 2000
Performance, Publication
High (bridi) Tea is a performative collaboration between artist Haruko Okano and writer Fred Wah that explores the visual and textual terrain of racial and cultural hybridity. The performance installation centres on table settings for 16 guests and, based on a material relationship on fungus and mould, plays with issues of contamination. Through a series of anecdotes and textual surprises, Okano and Wah interact with audience assumptions and expectations to create an unstable and questioning emulsion of language and memory. Haruko Okano is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver. Fred Wah is a Calgary based writer and teaches at the University of Calgary.

May 25, 2000
Performance
A literary and philosophical stroll through the labyrinthine aisles of Walmart, throughout which Faust, now a Walmart CEO, weighs and ponders the value of his soul. His task today is to oversee the new arrival of genetically modified homunuli and to make sure they are not overpriced. True to his character he reviews important company items such as evil, the perverse imagination, online wagers, corporate expansion and the need for greed. His eternal sidekick Mephisto, provides useful information on diabolical investment schemes and shoplifting. While Faust and Mephisto argue about the merits of Nietzche, on the occasion of the centennial of his death, a mischievous homunculus makes a run for it.