A Message to You was originally conceived after an invitation from Johanna Tuukanen and Gregg Whelan to make a performance for the Väinölänniemi Stadium in Kuopio as part of the Anti Festival in Finland in 2008. The Anti Festival specialises in performance work in settings such as libraries, old people’s homes, private homes and we were anticipating some sort of intimate space but were allotted the sports stadium!
We decided that we would counter the scale and public nature of the stadium with our archive of every text message we send each other, which accompanies our long-term collection of every journey we make.
The task of the durational performance A Message to You is to shout the text messages we sent each other starting a year to the day we perform and continuing up until the last text message we send before the performance. Depending on the amount of messages we’ve sent each other in the year leading up to the performance, it lasts 3-4 hours.
A Message to You was performed twice in 2008, first in Finland and then as part of the performance art day at Preview Berlin at the entrance to hangar 2 at the former airport at Tempelhof.
On 11 June 2016 we performed A Message to You in Reading, UK, as part of Amy Sharrocks’ festival ‘Do Rivers Dream of Oceans?‘
