3-12 Aug at 11:00 am – 9:00 pm
Summerhall (venue 26) / 1 Summerhall (EH9 1PL)
Tickets: No admission charge
In tandem with the Small Narration piece, which the artist calls a 'heavy performance', Ziemilski presents an installation, Relatives, which is also concerned with ideas of family and inheritance. When a friend of Ziemilski discovered that - unbeknownst it to her - her biological roots were Chinese, this inspired Ziemilski to think about what family actually meant. He began to meditate on the intangible things that tie us together as people even when we’re scattered far and wide across the planet. To this end he decided to create a kind of family reunion for people with the surname Huang (the seventh most common surname in China). There are millions of Huangs in the world and Ziemilski sought to find some way of (re)unifying them. To do this he turned - of course - to the internet.
Relatives takes the form of a video collage. Each sequence, sourced on YouTube, shows a person named Huang (or one of its variant spellings) singing John Lennon’s Imagine. They are singing this song of togetherness on their own to an unseen and unknown audience. There are moments of near harmony but it always seems just out of reach, the voices never quite sync. In this way the 'family' Huang are reunited, their commonality and their distance from one another simultaneously emphasised through this act of juxtaposition.
Co-created by Ziemilski with Sean Palmer, the Relatives project was borne out of a performance devised in cooperation with Sean Palmer and Dominik Skrzypkowski.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN:
If there is more than 1 person, you can meet and have a beer.
If there are more than 10 people, you can enjoy a commol meal.. If there are more than 100 people, you can organise a party at a nightclub.
If there are more than 1000 people, you can organise a conference with delicious lunches and make a day-long event which involves meeting dozens and dozens of people from all over.
If there are more than 10 000 people, you can make a huge outdoor party with fireworks and entertainment.
If there are more than 100 000 people, you can make an event that is larger than a championship football game.
If there are more than 1000 000 people, you will be more than the city's population. You can take the city over. And do whatever you want.
Wojtek Ziemilski is a graduate of the theatre direction programme at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisboa. He is the author of a performance entitled Small Narration, based on the personal history of his own grandfather, count Wojciech Dzieduszycki - a recognised journalist and music critic whose good name was recently darkened upon the discovery of his collaboration with SB, Poland’s secret police of the communist era. Ziemilski also collaborated with komuna// warszawa on the Map project, and he authored a visual installation entitled Actors at the TR Warszawa. He regularly cooperates with Krytyka Polityczna, komuna// warszawa, Warsaw’s Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, and the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute. He runs his own blog on contemporary art (new-art.blogspot.com) and posts in a daily photo-column on Krytyka Polityczna’s website.