Clusterfuck is a term used to describe a kind of catch 22, in which a series of problematic events occur simultaneously with the effect of mutually disrupting each other's outcomes.
For Trace:Displaced in Sydney the Trace Collective built a suspended floor structure in Artspace galleries 1 and 2. This was a scaled replication of the floor area in the ‘domestic’ TRACE artspace situated in an inhabited terrace house in Cardiff.
During each day of the public ‘live’ work the artists engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the installation, navigating its physicality and making interventions upon its structure. Collective activity included the dismantling of a number of 1980’s Australian built Holden Commodore cars combined with accumulative documentary videos of ‘live’ work created in and around Sydney during their residency. References to locations and conditions in and around Old South Wales were displaced and relocated to NSW, creating multi-layered investigations referencing departure and arrival though a post-colonial-cluster-fuck.
The public had full access throughout to experience the ‘live’ activity with the resulting installation/evidence and residual traces on view as an exhibition throughout September 2009.
Since 2000, TRACE, dedicated to the research, investigation, dissemnination and discourse of performance art, has presented a broad range of solo live performance artworks in a terraced house in Adamsdown, Cardiff, by the most significant practitioners working in the world today. Each artist also presented an installation exhibition at Moira Place consisting of the residue or ‘traces’ from their performance activity. According to TRACE, ‘the seemingly left-over or discarded matter from performance activity is offered up for contemplation and reflection in relation to contemporary artists exploration, and research. In bringing together these discreet elements one becomes aware of a certain unity of practice; a living archive centred on process, events and experiences - ‘traces’ that embody that fragile quality where the object itself is imbued with the performance that created it’. With this in mind, the collective also creates regular exhibitions of its archive based documentations, residues and partial objects created through the process of performance art.
TRACE also aims to represent the intersections between artistic disciplines. A place for wider discourse and dissemination of contemporary art practice that seeks to place emphasis on context in the working process. However, the focus is primarily performative - exploring the previously untried ways of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ offered by the co-habitation of performance art, it’s ‘traces’ and residues’ and it’s implication for installation based art.
