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unfallen
Unfallen is the continuation of the lecture performance series started in 2001 with Falling. It is the story of three accidents I have had or witnessed in London where I was born and grew up.
In 1974, aged 8, I was knocked over by a white Ford Escort on the way home from Alderwood Primary School in South East London.
In 1984 I tripped on a kerb and head-butted a cast iron lamppost in Piccadilly Circus on a trip to the Royal Academy with my first girlfriend, Claire Lemmon.
In 1994 I witnessed a man jumping from a blazing building in St John’s Street, Clerkenwell, London, a few hundred yards from where I lived at the time. I later found out that the building was an illegal pornographic cinema club which had been set alight by a disgruntled member.
Stories that seem straightforward until you start to research them and find out what tricks your memory plays. Stories that make you wonder how many stories a city contains, multiple, overlapping, unmarked, changing as memories change and they are passed from generation to generation.
Unfallen is the plotting of these events on a map and overlaying this on wherever I perform the piece, then going to these locations, looking for my history in a city I know little about or have never visited. A way of talking about the fact that on arrival in a new city, you are reminded of other cities you know, comparing it to these, projecting these city onto the one you are walking through so the ‘real’ city and the cities in your head are overlaid over one another.
It is the obsessive collection of everywhere I go, so that I can see the drawing of my life, a practice I have been following since I started to spend more time in Berlin, a city I wanted to watch myself learn about in a way that I can’t with London.
It is the illustration of these stories, personal theories of time, space and psychology through maps of Piccadilly Circus stitched into blanket material, maps made of fish fingers, demonstrations of the earth’s rotation on oranges and the plaster cast of a log in a forest on the edge of Berlin.
It is an honouring of the accidental encounter with something or someone that changes a life forever. The way these events represent the co-incidence between that which we had planned and that enormity of possibility we can never plan. The marking of that which readily leaves marks on our soft bodies but not on the hard architecture of the city.
Unfallen is different every time I perform it, not only because it responds to the different locations that my accidents happen in the places I perform it but because I incorporate new material and honour the fact that I have changed since the first time I made the piece in 2002.
Unfallen was an Arnolfini Breathing Space commission.
I would like to thank the Artsadmin Artists Bursary scheme for starting my solo practice in 2001, the Arnolfini, håb, the Green Room, Vooruit, Nordscen, Unfriendly Takeover, PICA, the Performance Space and Stephen Hodge.
To date there have been:
Unfallen Bristol
Unfallen Berlin
Unfallen Manchester
Unfallen Gent
Unfallen Helsinki
Unfallen Perth
Unfallen Sydney
Unfallen Frankfurt am Main
Unfallen Exeter