November 2004

 

LAMENT

In November, I performed a lament for products to coincide with Buy Nothing Day. I and a friend dressed up as women in black and walked slowly around the west end of London , performing a text I had written, in certain places. The performance lasted about ten minutes. There were no spoken words but a text printed onto A4 sheets that my friend passed on to me as we both cried our lament for products and consumers.

Lots of people stopped their shopping routine to watch part or all of our performance. Some people smiled, one man congratulated us afterwards while his wife looked at us suspiciously. The people in Starbucks tried to avoid our gaze and I remember being struck by how unusual it was to interact with the urban space in such a way that I could feel the smell and the grime of the ground in Oxford Street (I ended the performance collapsing in silent tears with my partner racked with tears by my side).
The text was a silent translation of our cry as our performance didn’t seek to compete with the noises of the west end. The most interesting aspect of the performance was the ability to choose the place of the performance and therefore the audience. We performed to a queue of people waiting to take money out from a cashpoint machine and to people sitting in the window of Starbucks coffee shop (facing out).