Cally Spooner

An opera singer sings messages which roll out on an LED screen like surtitles at an opera. The messages are comments posted on YouTube by discontented fans on videos in which the lies of celebrities are exposed: the Lance Armstrong doping scandal, for example, or Beyoncé lip synching to a pre-recorded “Star- Spangled Banner’’ at Barack Obama’s second term inauguration. This piece reflects Cally Spooner’s researches into hysteria in the media and reveals how dependent on technology people are, as well as how staged their behaviour can be and their discourse governed and robotised by digital mechanisation.

Cally Spooner is a writer and artist. Her texts combine a mixture of theory, philosophy, pop music, current affairs issues and entrepreneurial rhetoric. Spooner produces short stories with no plot, disjointed scenarios, monologues recorded on a loop, and musical arrangements as a means of staging the movement and functioning of speech. By appropriating as forms and references
such different performance genres as musical comedies, advertising spots and radio plays, Spooner looks at the way in which disembodied, indeterminate and unmediated performance can exist within the extreme visibility of entertainment and today’s short attention spans.

Collection Enea Righi, courtesy of the artist and gb agency – Paris

Performance Day is coproduced with the Playground festival, (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum Leuven), with support from the Agency for Arts and Heritage of Flanders, as part of the project "Alfred Jarry Archipelago" initiated by La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisiel (France), Le Quartier Centre for Contemporary Art in Quimper (France) and Museo Marino Marini in Florence (Italy). The venture is part of Piano, the Franco-Italian art exchange platform, in collaboration with M-Museum and the STUK Kunstencentrum in the framework of Playground in Leuven (Belgium).