Disclosed Location

For her Volt commission, Vlatka Horvat has invited four artists working in diverse modes – from performance and dance to installation, video and text – to devise and lead public tours of a vacant storefront space at Veiten 2B in Bergen, previously occupied by a flower shop.

Horvat has worked extensively with found or repurposed spaces, transforming and re-imagining them by reorganizing them spatially, or by intervening in them by means of provisional and temporary gestures and materials. For her project in Bergen, developed especially for a vacant two-storey storefront at Veiten 2B, Horvat decided to leave the space empty and to transform it not by filling it with ‘things’, but by summoning in it different imagined histories, narratives and events.

Through a series of public tours lead by four artists, the project stages a kind of a performative enlivening of an empty space, in which things, events and images are conjured and evoked rather than displayed, and in which the particular physical and spatial properties of a site, its architecture, as well as its economic, social and material realities might serve as an impetus to investigate the relation of the built space (and empty space in particular) to human presence, agency and a sense of possibility.

Horvat’s recent spatial installations have often focused on the question and construction of the viewers’ presence – exploring the ways in which interventions in a physical space might affect how we move in and through it, what choices we might make in it, and how space itself might determine what can (or cannot) happen in it. Disclosed Location approaches a specific vacant space as a site of potential, in which a location is repeatedly altered and re-imagined through acts of projection, summoning and imagination. As different artists’ tours of the space unfold over the course of a week, multiple stories, narratives and versions of the space are layered on top of one another, colliding with other narratives and paths, creating a sense of dense possibility (and impossibility) for the space and its imagined pasts, presents and futures.

The invited artists who conceived and lead the public tours of the empty flower shop space were: performance maker and playwright Deborah Pearson (Royal Holloway University), multimedia artist and musician Pedro Gomez Egaña (Bergen University), dancer and choreographer Wendy Houstoun, and artist and writer Augusto Corrieri (University of Sussex).

Following four days of public tours, the project culminated with a day of discursive events, which included Horvat's lecture performance about empty space, developed around image material donated for the presentation by some 30 international artists; and a panel discussion between Horvat and the artists participating in Disclosed Location, reflecting on the approaches and strategies they used in devising tours of the space, and further probing some of the concerns raised by the project.

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