XITY
Prototype 3: identifying-x
"These are the elements that build up over time to create the city’s personality and its identifying marks. Once formed, they are not easily erased or forgotten. They form the starting points and references for everything that follows. But they can be changed or undermined. They contain the traces of a city’s past and the basis for its evolution.”
- Deyan Sudjic, The Language of Cities (p.85)
Development
In identifying-x, the cumulation and culmination of multiple layers of time and space synchronise in a single performing body-x. Here, the individual and collective archives of inhabitants are recalled (from mapping-x), the recollections of lived experiences navigating city spaces and infrastructure (from building-x), now converge in a projection superimposing traces of the past, imprints of the present, gesturing towards an idiosyncratic vision of the XITY's future, embodied by inhabitant-x.
Material
Recalling the explorations where projection and shadow play were used from Phase 2 (Light x Body), the artistic team accumulates the archives of the multiple mapping-x performers using a composite of the mapping-x archive transparent plastic sheets, and light projection.
Movement
The performer weaves oneself amongst the plastic sheets, meditating on each their own personal lived experiences of cityscapes, with the effect of generating layers of personal and collective identities that give rise to each xity's emerging identity.
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The resultant friction between performer and mapping-x layers generates resonant echoes, warping multiple slices of time and memories. Ultimately, what arises is a convergence of xity-inhabitant traces, however lasting or ephemeral they may be.
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