Devotion to the line.
2017.
Performance, conversation.

TASC Ablett and Brafield were invited to take part in a group exhibition at Gallery Latitude 28 for which we devised a new performative work. Our work uses food as a tool for discussion around art, society and culture and we often use the table as a charismatic object that enables conversation as every sits facing towards eachother on the same level. However, when envisioning our future relationship to food for this exhibition, we considered the queue as an alternative form in which people will have to relate to eachother; rather than facing towards eachother, each person will face the back of someone’s head- how does this affect the way that we interact and communicate with eachother.

We were also interested in the illusion of fairness that a queue creates, eg ‘first come, first served’ and played with this in the performance.

The audience were asked to form a variety of different queues with different conditions: oldest to youngest; most needy to least needy; who has traveled the furthest; who is the wealthiest). Following this, TASC invited the audience to take part in a group reading, using text from Valdimir Sorokin’s ‘The Queue’, an experimental novel based around queuing for food during the Soviet times.
The performance led to a group discussion on resources, differing cultural customs and fairness. The work was recorded in photographs and memory.