16 inhabitants / 16 drafters

Our installation for the Biennale will imagine 16 different characters inhabiting the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre. These characters will be embodied by 16 drafters. Some rooms / drawings will be occupied by one person at a time; other rooms will accommodate many individuals simultaneously. All 16 characters will gather in certain rooms / drawings (in the dining hall and living room, for example) at key times of the day. In Venice, animation and time-based projection will allow us to represent movement and the passage of time. In order to produce the drawings, however, we needed to develop a form of drawing which would allow us to determine, plan and communicate the drawings we needed to do.

We needed to establish a method of planning which could represent both time and space; like a form of musical notation overlaid on the plan of the building. The sketch above came to fulfil this role. Each coloured rectangle represents a video recording of a drawing produced by one of the 16 drafters as they notionally move from room to room in the building and, correspondingly, from drawing to drawing on the floor space of the installation.

We began to make recordings of the act of drawing – the movement – and to test how the recordings could be composed to suggest many characters moving through many spaces.

We are inspired by 20th Century composers such as Karl Heinz Stockhausen; Xenaxis and Edgard Varèse, who thought of ‘music as spatial – as moving bodies of sound in space’. If music can be spatial; can drawing, then, be temporal?