The Mission
Vito Valentinov
coloured pencils on paper
Where:
typical inter-block space
with football goals
Description
Two participants stand in separate areas (P-shaped structures – doorways without nets in inter-block spaces). In this arrangement, the two performers are at a sufficient distance that they cannot communicate verbally. They use hand gestures to convey messages to each other.
In the streets, in the gardens, in the inter-block spaces and everywhere around the city there are many abandoned or worn-out objects, structures and parts of buildings. I like to use things that already exist, but have long been defunct or have a banal purpose. Giving them a metaphorical meaning, activating them as play devices, turning them into props for fictions. All objects placed in cities are designed to serve us – practically. I want them to have another layer of significance. To have another kind of relationship with them – a symbolic one.
As an artist, I’m excited by the constant return to the body, both as a metaphor and as a performative process, because no matter what we’ve invented over millennia of history, the human body remains the most precise technology we apply always and everywhere. For me, games and gamification define the approach to building relationships. The game-like interaction of transmitter and receiver, of encrypting and decrypting messages, provides a field for tangible action for participants who are not just passive observers but active participants.