The Girl in the Display Case: Innovation Installation - Creative Performance Practice

Last week (Wednesday 20th February 2019), one of our students climbed into our largest library display case for an afternoon.  As you can imagine, this provoked quite a bit of interest, both in the Library, and online!  (You'll remember that we blogged about it at the time, here.)

We asked Anna how she felt it had all gone, and we thought it would be nice to share her comments with you:-

"glad to hear that the installation provoked interest. Here's some thoughts after the installation:-
 What does sustainability mean? That has been one of my main questions during the performance research project that I am currently focusing on. 

Sustainability by the definition of  Bruntland Report for the World Commission on Environment and Development (1992) refers to 'development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.'

As a part of this research I installed objects found in nature alongside myself in a glass display in the Whittaker Library. This durational performance lasted almost six hours. The performance, named Still Life, was a performance of stillness, of plastic and sustainability. The task of being as still as possible soon became the main performance; the limited space of the display restricting my poses made it hard to maintain one for a long period of time. By changing my pose time to time I managed to find sustainable poses that then became the pattern of the movement of the performance. To my surprise I managed to give a fright so couple of people by breaking the stillness I had been maintaining. 'Is that a real person?' was a question I heard many times.

After a couple of hours inside the glass display I started to feel like the glass walls were the polluted atmosphere of the earth, and I represented the overpopulation of the planet, sharing my space with objects that no longer were useful to us and thus were thrown away and forgotten about.

How to live our lives as sustainably as possible? After this experiment I'd say that it takes a lot of re-arranging, re-configuring and re-adjusting to the existing conditions. It is a continuous process of discovering better ways to maintain and preserve what we have. It is an ongoing conversation rather than a question with an answer. We are accustomed to a certain comfort in our lives - which is natural - but when it comes to sustainability there are certain choices we have to make - if not for ourselves then for the future."