- Venue
- Yorkshire Artspace
- Location
- Yorkshire
Katie Davies’ practice often focuses on the nature of the ambiguous threshold zone between one state and another, or on spaces that are somehow liminal or transitional. During her recent residency at Sheffield Town Hall (2008), Davies explored how the fragile rules of ceremony – and of various local government procedures and protocol– often rely on the precarious authority of tradition and the continuation of common values and beliefs, without which they could lose their power and become little more than empty gestures. The work produced focused on those spaces and areas of activity in the Town Hall that are marked by a sense of transition or decision-making – such as the citizenship ceremonies or the council meetings – drawing attention to the codes of behaviour and civic rituals which surround them. Davies produced a new video work during the residency that was screened in the foyer of the town hall.
In the video, Commonwealth, Davies shifts her focus between three distinct types of ceremonial activity taking place within the Town Hall: the citizenship ceremonies, the council meetings and a one-off brass-band performance which was orchestrated at the artist’s request in one of the Council’s ceremonial chambers. Davies’ editing blurs the edges between these different contexts; fragments of sound from one location become dislocated and bleed over into the frame of another, offering an aural sub-text in which unexpected parallels and analogies are made. The pledges and promises of prospective citizens, for example, might as easily apply to those council members who have been sworn in to office; however the observation of certain similarities functions as a foil that simultaneously draws attention to the differences and discrepancies between these two groups. Panning shots of empty rooms paused and awaiting undisclosed gatherings become underscored with the discordant melody of the brass-band rehearsal. Both elements remain suspended at the point of anticipation or of preparation, perpetually tuning up and ever maintaining their readiness.
Davies occupies an ambivalent position in relation to the events that she witnesses; her work critically reflects on how the function of the ceremonial is often double-edged. During the ceremony or ritual an individual might gain access to certain rights and permissions that had hitherto been denied, yet at the same time such ceremonies can be used as a method of control and order, where existing rules and hierarchies become reinforced and sustained. The weekly citizenship ceremonies became a point of focus during Davies’ residency, for they presented a specific context – a ceremonial rite of passage – in which these contradictory ideas could be explored. The concept of citizenship itself is inevitably inflected by the rhetoric of the media. However, Davies attempts to remain neutral or rather she suggests that the issue of citizenship itself can be understood as a shimmering tipping point where it is possible to inhabit or present more than one position or remain in two minds. However anachronistic the pledges and proposed values of the ceremony might seem, even the briefest encounter with any one of the new citizens reveals the importance and significance of this rite of passage. Individual narratives and back-stories silently rupture the surface of the proceedings; quiet reminders of what is actually at stake. Whilst the ceremonial might endeavour to support an existing order or keep things in their place, an inevitable period of instability and unruliness is simultaneously produced therein. Ceremony inadvertently creates that which it seeks to control. Anthropologist Victor Turner argues that during the liminal or transitional phase of any ritual performance – especially during rites of passage – the characteristics of the social structure are momentarily collapsed, as “the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity”[i] where “they are at once no longer classified and not yet classified”.[ii] For Turner, during this phase, “the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, [it is] an instant of pure potentiality in which everything, as it were, trembles in the balance”.[iii]
Davies’ work reflects on those moments when the rules or order of a ceremony and its protocol begin to collapse or disintegrate, the instances where the specificity of the individual reasserts itself once more. She draws attention to the points where the collective identity of a group becomes frayed at the edges, to those brief interludes within a ceremonial performance when the mask of duty or anonymity momentarily falls to reveal signs of the individual beneath. Davies highlights those moments when the formality of the ceremonial proceedings lapses to create gaps and caesura that are then inhabited by the individual in various ways. The work reveals the drifts and slips and pockets of inattention, boredom and momentary distraction that inevitably occur before and during the ceremonial event itself; the uncertainty and irresolution that is a necessary part of any process of decision-making or public performance. Any decision involves a gesture of renunciation or rejection, the termination of one trajectory of possibilities in favour of another. Allegiance to or belonging within one particular group or party might then mean that others are relinquished, forgotten or are cast aside. In one sense, Davies’ work reveals the presence of latent societal values, provoking further questions around what it might mean to belong or not belong within a given context; what is at stake, what is to be gained, what forfeited or lost. It attempts to create gaps and ruptures in the Town Hall’s ceremonial proceedings and protocol; spaces of reflection or tipping points around which such questions might be hinged. Davies focuses on the moments of potentiality before an allegiance is pledged, a decision made or a performance actualised; thus making visible the unstable and uncertain thresholds within the ceremonial before order is returned, the tipping points where things shimmer or remain hanging in the balance.
Emma Cocker, 2009
[i] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), p.24.
[ii] Turner, ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’ in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, (Cornell University Press, 1967), p.96.
[iii] Turner, 1982, p.44.