For the 6th Anti Festival in Kuopio, Finland, we presented a new project especially conceived for the Väinölänniemi Stadium. We have tried to keep every text message (SMS) that we have sent each other since Autumn 2006 and decided to use this material to shout to each other across the opposing seating banks of the stadium.
From the very beginning, there were a handful of loyal supporters, inspired to help by the strain they heard in our voices being taken by the wind, surrounding us. At half time we changed ends, oranges were eaten and more lemon tea was drunk. The wind seemed meaner and there were squalls of cold rain falling as most spectators stayed on the side of the bigger seating bank, which was more sheltered from the wind and rain. They watched as Dan made every effort on his own to be heard across the football pitch and running track. Eventually three French-speaking Belgian women came to help, two of whom stayed until the bitterly cold end when, after 3 ½ hours of shouting, Sophia read out the last message she'd sent while we were in the airport in Helsinki on the journey to the festival.
We read out 481 unedited messages, starting with messages sent exactly a year before the day on which we performed. Surprisingly, our voices didn't fail despite not being in the slightest bit trained for this amount of shouting in the cold.
We would like to thank Laura Lahti, Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan, the festival volunteers and the other artists who came along and supported us. We are especially grateful to Christa Donner not only for lending us her voice but also taking photographs for us. We would also like to thank Sian Robinson Davies and Charlotte Silver for typing in the text messages to the database.
On 30 october 2008, we performed a special version of A Message to You outside Hangar 2 at Tempelhof Airport, Berlin. It was the day before the last flight was due to take off and so the last remaining day of Tempelhof operating as one of Berlin's airports. The occaision was Preview Berlin, part of the Art Fair held each year in Berlin. We situated ourselves on two opposing bridges over the service road that formed the entrance to Hangar 2 so that people entered the fair underneath our performance. Due to the noisy nature of the site this time, and the fact that it was not intended as a participatory performance on this occasion, we used two megaphones to shout our messages to and fro.