Page 20 - Mistranslation Laboratory: An Unfolding

Portugal - Cascais Museu del Carmo
It is eight in the morning / combing the beach in Cascais for unwanted plastic/ the aged plastic / worn salty colours /the way once functional shapes are rendered abstract by the
tides.
A symposium in Portugal is so different to the Performance Arcade festival – in Wellington we performed right after a Pride Parade, and the beach kept gifting us balloons. Here cigarette butts are ubiquitous. We have the standard finds – odd shapes of plastic, its past use invisibilised, ice cream wrappers, ice-cream sticks, drinking straws, parts of beer bottles.
Textures of over-writing are made in a tidal wash of shells and rocks and tides. Back at the apartment, clean this treasure carefully, pack it along with a tray, chalk, lab coats, hot
glue gun and glue sticks, in preparation for a lecture- demonstration of the Mistranslation Laboratory score Hot Glue Taskforce. In this participatory performance a tray of fragments of found objects will be presented as a ‘collection of vibratory bodies.’ Audiences are invited to listen for these vibratory bodies to call out to them, to arrange them in a satisfying way on a sample card, then to hot-glue them into place, and to name this work for exhibition in an art gallery. Participants are encouraged to use poetic, rather than literal logic to find the names for
their works. This iteration of the laboratory is presented at the Museu del Carmo, Lisbon, in a symposium on Sustainability and Serendipity in Artistic Research. The symposium crowd is local. There is no understanding the the lilt of Portugese introductions made by José Quaresma and Fernando Rosa Dias, although the warmth of the atmosphere is quite evident through and the tone of the hosts. The open air ruins of the convent translate sky to architecture and folds in time across a thousand years are acutely perceptible.