Untitled (06)
A durational performance lasting eight hours, conducted in a public space without announcement. The performer carries out a sequence of actions derived from the maintenance tasks performed by the building’s cleaning staff — the mopping of floors, the emptying of bins, the replacement of paper towels — but in slow motion, at one-fifth of the functional speed. The actions are not theatrical; they are performed with the same attention and economy that the original tasks require. The slowness is the intervention.
Most viewers do not at first recognise the performance as such. The instruction given to the performer is to continue regardless of recognition: to be willing to be invisible as a performer while remaining visible as a body in a space performing labour.
Research: Labour, Duration, Attention
The work is situated within a long conversation about the representation of labour in contemporary art — from Hans Haacke’s institutional critiques to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art manifestos, which remain foundational here. Ukeles’s insight that maintenance work is structurally invisible within the cultural economy is extended rather than restated: the question is not whether maintenance work will be seen but under what conditions it will be attended to.
The decision to work in slow motion — rather than, for example, through interruption or re-contextualisation — emerged from a reading of Pierre Huyghe’s durational works and their interest in the altered temporality of attention. Slow motion is not metaphor; it is a method for generating the conditions under which habitual perception becomes visible as habit.
Duration research drew on Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreographic notebooks, which were accessed with the permission of the Rosas archive. The notebooks describe a practice of timing that treats slowness not as an absence of speed but as its own positive quality — a different relationship to the passing of time.
Documentation and Reproducibility
The performance is documented through a continuous video recording, unedited, and through a log maintained by an observer who records the responses of passersby at five-minute intervals. Both documents are considered part of the work.
The performance may be re-enacted by the artist or by performers trained by the artist, following a written score that specifies the sequence of actions, the proportional slowness of execution, and the spatial parameters of the site. Each re-enactment is a new instance of the same work, not a reproduction of an original.