To Stop Now and Then

Vlatka Horvat’s one-to-one performance To Stop Now and Then takes the form of a phone call between the artist and a single audience member at a time, conducted while the artist is outside walking.

Each day of the project, Horvat went on a several hours-long walk, passing through parks and city streets in and around her neighbourhood in North London. Through the remote exchange, the callers/audience members tap into the ever-changing experience of moving through the city as they listen to Horvat narrating, describing and asking questions about what she is seeing at that particular moment. Horvat’s improvised text, based on close looking at what is happening around her, conjures a series of fragmented images set against a live soundscape of city life and urban nature.

The piece invites the callers to imagine the scenes and images being described to them and at the same time to see them in their own surroundings. Both an invitation to imagine what isn’t there in the immediate settings they occupy, and to look more closely at what is actually there, the piece performs a perceptual transformation of the caller’s commonplace as the act of listening gives rise to a new hybrid space of imagination and speculation, in which Horvat’s described scenes are superimposed on what the caller sees in their own environment – creating a merger of the actual and the imagined, of what is seen and what can be conjured.

To Stop Now and Then is a new commission for Who’s Calling? Queering the Telephone – a telephone performance festival, Berlin, Germany, presented in June 2022. Curated by Julia Katharina Thiemann and supported by Kultursommer Rheinland-Pfalz and Ludwigshafener Kultursommer, Germany.