An Ordinary 24 Hours: Conflict, Process, Repetition

Nadija Mustapić
2007

Single channel video
SD video, NTSC, color, 18 min 10 sec
(in an installation, usually presented with a series of objects: 8 documentation folders, a blackboard, table and a chair)

Production specifications:
Producer, editing: Nadija Mustapić
Language: English, Croatian
Camera: shot by random audience members
Performers: Nadija Mustapić, Marnie Glazier, Tomislav Friščić, Bryan Burgess

Description:

This video reconstructs a 24-hour-long performance called “An Ordinary 24 Hours”, which happened on a public site in front of a Frenk Gehry budildng in Iowa City, on the University campus.
An ongoing sunrise -to-sunrise performance explored publicly exposed situations and states of conflict. It was heavily structured to allow for public–interactive improvisations to occur. The audience and random passers by were challenged to participate as actors, witnesses or observers. The period of 24 hours was divided into cycles of three hours. During the first hour in the cycle (the hour of creation) an improvisational performance would get created based on set scenes’ titles, in the second hour (the performance) it would be performed and in the third hour (the documentation) it would get documented, written about and stored into files.
This “trilogy” was repeated 8 times.

During the repetition, the content of the performance, of the creation and the documentation period have been continuously and slightly changed only:
-due to the interaction with the audience in this public site,
-in response to the changing weather, temperature, and the participants’ physical, mental and psychological conditions,
-in order to explore the believability of scenes of conflict, which do not get accompanied with their resolutions

Throughout the repetition cycles of creating and re-creating, performing and re-performing, documenting and re-documenting, some slight changes occurred only:
-due to the interaction with the audience in this public site,
-in response to the changing weather, temperature, and the participants’ physical, mental and psychological conditions,
-in order to explore the believability of scenes of conflict, which do not get resolved

During the 24-hours of enacting, re-creating and re-documenting the same scenes of conflicts, the audience witnessed the performers’ physical and psychological efforts to sustain the matrix of the pre-determined process of repetition. The performers’ task was to get the audience to participate by improvising roles that would be assigned to them or to bring into the performance any other form of audience interaction, be it ignoring, commenting, criticizing or playing along.

The challenge was to balance, on one hand, the task of delving into the “reality” of exponential conflicts, and on the other, the mechanical process of arriving to an “understanding” or a template through the form of repetition. A sense of “reality” and of “understanding” was to be obtained through methodical examination of states of conflict in a context of repetitive and continuous paradigms. The mechanical and meditative nature of the repetition matrix (the cycle of three hours of the performance) suggested a method of arriving to a point of perfection (the truth of the matter), and/or to a point of de-sensitization.

There was a certain sense of urgency, which resulted from the intense interactions between the site, the building, the performers among themselves and with the audience, and the given time, temperature and weather oscillations, over and over again.
It resembled a vigil.

 

Exhibitions:

– May 2008 – Stand Up art action, Rijeka, Croatia, single channel video installation, “An Ordinary 24 Hours: Conflict, Process, Repetition”
– March 2007 – namaTRE.ba Contemporary Video Art and Photography exhibition, Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina , screening of “An Ordinary 24 Hours: Conflict, Process, Repetition”
– 2006 – PLAC II (Print Language as Content II), Southern Grahics Council, madison, Wisconsin, USA