On Tuesday, in order to flip the experience we had the previous week on its side, we decided to go into Trafalgar Square on the offense. I had bought some sidewalk chalk in the though that we might draw something and participate in the square that way. However, we couldn’t think of something intentional that we would want to draw with sidewalk chalk. It is still an area for consideration, however, as is drawing shapes and mazes with water on the pavement that evaporate in a matter of moments.
For this particular experiment, I made a white sign with the word ‘CONVERSATIONS!’ written in black acrylic paint, and I planned to stand there and record audio while Neveah filmed. We had talked to Ian beforehand about the nature of real-estate in Trafalgar Square. On one level, the way that performers arrange themselves is just for maximal visibility because of its correlation with the most money you can get, and the way that tourists arrange themselves tends to be around where they can best see said street performers or where they can get the best photo from their holiday, to document the fact of their being in Trafalgar Square. There seems to be a transactional nature about this exposure.
So, we decided to go into Trafalgar Square with a hybrid incentive. We would take the positionally of street performers to be hyper visible, but what we were getting was more of the nature of the tourist, a documentation of our experience within the place. In order to incentivize people to talk to us, I created some stickers in the style of the David Gentleman’s Charing Cross mural that decorates the walls of the tube via the northern line under the surface, but instead of depicting people from 8 centuries ago in the construction of eponymous cross, I made street performers.
It was very awkward at first. However, there was a certain protective nature of the sign and the camera that established we were in control of the situation. Going up to people to ask them their opinions has always felt a bit intrusive to me. Inviting people in felt much more like a choice on both party’s positions.
Having a camera and a recording device definitely changed the dynamic of the conversation. The people that came to talk to us were quite aware of the camera, and they cheated out accordingly. The conversations felt more like performances rather than discussions, so perhaps when we run the experiment again, we won’t go out with devices. We can just rely on our memory to stitch together the performance. I know I wanted it to be more about interacting with people than documentation, so if we have to sacrifice the documentation piece, that is okay.
One of the most interesting things about this performance was how ‘visible’ we became because of the sign and the camera. I would say that the sign was an even stronger force than the camera. There was this natural curiosity about people who wanted to see why a person would be stopped in Trafalgar Square. I could hear people making remarks about me and taking pictures of me, though only a few ended up actually interacting. A woman that was sat behind us on the grass by the National Gallery came up, peeked around, and read aloud to her friends behind, “Con-ver-sa-tions!”, smiled, and went back without actually talking. It was a strange space to inhabit. Being still in a space, like the living statues, invited a passive looking. However, my face wasn’t concealed by a mask, and I wasn’t executing an expected performance, so people were often a bit taken aback about what to do. Perhaps this had something to do with the nature of what was on the sign. “Conversations!” could have been too vague. “Hey, how are you?”, “Stories!”, or “Want to talk?” could have all produced vastly different responses. I am curious to go out again with more explicit, directional language. But once again, I liked the notion of “conversations” because it didn’t necessarily imply who was starting, and that equal implication of performance and participation was interesting.
Overwhelmingly, I was taken aback by the kindness and openness of the people that did end up talking to us. Granted, there weren’t a lot of them, but the ones that did speak to us were incredibly respectful and enthusiastic. Some were just interested in the idea. At the end of the conversation, we gave people a choice of stickers to thank them for their time and to bring about that idea of reversal of street performance as well as underground and overground, and people were delighted to have them.
After the batteries on our devices died, we went around installing some of these stickers in and around the upper parts of Trafalgar Square as well as in the underground, knowing that they would probably not last very long, but the ephemeral nature of their ‘claim’ on a space is similar to that of the actual practice of the street performers.
RCA Graduate Diploma 