When conceiving the intervention for an outdoor event in the city centre of Geneva I was mostly concerned with my reality as an artist, with being a producer without funding in a world that is obsessed with productivity and outcome.

In reality I did not have the means to be producing anything at all. I concluded that at best I could perform a ritual in time, at least assert myself though a form of work that wasn't making anything at all.

The work echos the motiv of collecting water that is displayed in the stain-glass windows, but suggests an impossible goal: two women performers endeavour to scoop water from one side of the bridge and pour it into the other whilst working in opposition to each other.

The ritual both enacts and abstracts the adjacent biblical scene and transfigures a singular instance through a doubling and endless repetition.

As in previous works of mine the installation performs repetition, the impossible and the absurd. Choreographies disturb one pattern by performing another, challenge one system by creating another.

Apart from simply recycling its main material, water, the performance also recycles costumes that belong to another performance group, The Five Andrews.

Chosen for their black rubber skirts and fluorescent sleeves the costumes appear at first appropriate and achieve a useful kind of visibility.

However they go beyond a probable work wear to introduce a visuality that shifts the work sideways to becoming a piece of theatre or dance.

The recycling of elements, far from being a restriction, turns into excess that plays with the logic of economic thinking. In its impossibility to achieve anything the work becomes a form of play.

Each bucket is like a question asked but not answered. Each passage is a new beginning and another ending. With each pause the synchronisation of the performers is emphasised and the rules of the game asserted.

The impossibility of the task at hand does however not stop the activity. Strangely it becomes its motor.

There is no utopia in this work but it is a work after all, and a play.

In the end it is the kind of work art can do.


Conceived and choreographed by
Claudia Kappenberg

Performed by
Claudia Kappenberg and Elgin Clausen

Costumes kindly lent by
The Five Andrews, designed by Andrew Barker and fabricated by Julian Latorre

Video camera
Judy Price and Andrew Downs

Video editing
Claudia Kappenberg

DVD Authoring
Tom Dale

Technical Installation
Andrew James

Installation stills
Andrew Yale