DOUGALD HINE & PERFORMING PICTURES THE CROSSING OF TWO LINES
START ABOUT THE BOOK ABOUT THE AUTHORS CONTACT
Performing Pictures
Performing Pictures is an artist duo founded in Stockholm in 2004 by Geska Helena Brečević and Robert Brečević. They draw on their backgrounds in film-making, stage and costume design, cinema and drama criticism, and game design to make shorterthan-short films, snapshots that blur the line between still and motion media. These are built into physical objects, often installed in locations outside the fine-art circuit: a Stockholm railway station concourse, a watchtower on a former Soviet army base, the entrance to the cashiers hall of a bank in Istanbul. Their work combines stillness and movement, often coming alive at the moment a viewer approaches. This responsiveness creates a sense of intimacy and surprise, a playfulness that attracts and occasionally provokes. A visit to Mexico in 2008 led to an ongoing collaboration with the Talleres Comunitarios (Community Workshops) of Zegache, a pueblo of around 2000 people, 45 minutes journey by shared taxi from the city of Oaxaca. These workshops were founded by the Mexican painter Rodolfo Morales (1925-2001), who returned to his home region towards the end of his life and set about the restoration of the Baroque church of Santa Ana Zegache. In the saints, altars and chapels that are the result of this collaboration, techniques from different centuries combine. This phase of their work has also seen an increased attention to the patterns of human movement associated with economic migration and religious pilgrimage. Sometimes, in the migrant's dream of a final return, the separation between these secular and sacred patterns dissolves. Inspired by the sight of Mexican cycling pilgrimages, the Peregrini expedition traces a line from the Baltic to the Adriatic, installing roadside chapels along the way, ending at the house on the island of Rab which Robert's great-grandfather began building in 1939. The crossing of these lines - vertical and horizontal, temporal and spatial, secular and sacred-marks the spot on which these pictures perform their enterprise.
Dougald Hine
Dougald Hine grew up in the north-east of England and was educated at New College, Oxford. He is the author, with Paul Kingsnorth, of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto and the managing editor of Dark Mountain, a biannual journal of writing that challenges us to face the deep cultural roots of today's social, economic and ecological crises. His other publications include COMMONSense, with Anne-Marie Culhane, and Despatches from the Invisible Revolution, with Keith Kahn Harris. He has been responsible for creating a series of projects and organisations that straddle the borders between theory and action: hosting conversations, generating new thinking and putting it into practice in a way that catches people's imagination. These include the web startup School of Everything (inspired by Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society), the civic ideas agency Spacemakers, the New Public Thinking network, the University Project, and Redrawing the Maps, a week-long ‘free school' inspired by the life and work of John Berger. He left London in 2012 and is slowly arriving in Stockholm.
Transfer Studio
Transfer Studio is an independent design practice founded by Valeria Hedman and Falko Grentrup with offices in London and Stockholm. It helps companies define and communicate their unique vision and identity in the most powerful way possible: visually. With a distinctive approach to graphic design, a strong eye for quality and a knack for engaging audiences, the studio has established a reputation for imaginative, simple yet thoughtful work, with clients including MTV, the Southbank Centre and Kulturbryggan.
Get a copy of the book at Elemental Editions
Elemental Editions
Elemental Editions is an independent boutique publisher with a focus on outstanding book design and exciting collaborations with authors from around the world. By facilitating platforms for collaboration between designers, editors and authors, this publishing initiative reaches for unexpected narratives and creates unique compounds from the elements of printed matter. Elemental Editions' core ambition is to develop projects that explore new forms of initiating, producing, disseminating and experiencing publications.