PLASTIQUE FANTASTIQUE

About

In October David Burrows & Simon O'Sullivan will present and perform — Plastique Fantastique Protocols for Deceleration: night is also a sun - at OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich. Plastique Fantastique are a fictional group of human and inhuman avatars created by David Burrows & Simon O'Sullivan through assemblages, drawings, writing and comics and through ritualised performance. These ‘untimely' avatars deliver communiqués from the extreme past and the future. For the exhibition and performance at OUTPOST, Plastique Fantastique will draw upon the technologies and rituals of different (so-called) cults to access multiple durations and temporalities and to explore the relation of aesthetics, politics and the sacred through installation and performance. Protocols for Deceleration: night is also a sun presents four stations (in the form of looped films played on monitors) that deliver communiqués from Plastique Fantastique avatars. The installation will also include a sand/glitter drawing made the night before the exhibition opens and diagrams, objects, masks and drawings pertaining to the stations and the protocols to be enacted within the exhibition. Protocols for Deceleration will feature a chant recorded by Residue. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, visitors (or subjects) entering the installation are invited to engage with the stations and perform the protocols, to perform a clearing, and become possessed of an infinite deceleration. The exhibition culminates with a performance by Plastique Fantastique in which the group, sporting masks, materialize in Norwich city centre and parade through the streets to the gallery to perform a Deceleration Ritual, utilizing the four stations and destroying the sand/glitter drawing. Through this ritual the performers become cleared of habits and memory (until they can no longer see, speak or hear) and then become possessed by the avatars for different durations and times. Plastique Fantastique/David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan have previously performed at The Event for the International Project Space in Birmingham, exhibited at EASTinternational 2005, and will participate in Event Horizon at the Royal Academy in December 2008. For more information about Plastique Fantastique visit www.plastiquefantastique.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Deceleration Protocols: First protocol/station: Clearing the Volitions (until the commodity is no longer ‘seen', until the thing is no longer desired, until the thing is a thing). Second protocol/station: Unlearning the Learning (as you act, so you are). Third protocol/station: Speaking upside-down (until the space between speech and what is said becomes obliterated). Fourth protocol/station: Making the world/destroying the world (until the absence of myth is the only myth and you have lost your memory and do not know who you are).