The Description Factory
2017
Participatory performance
The description factory was a space design to look at the isolate the everyday conversation and try to limit its hierarchies.
Two to five person groups were invited to enter a space where they would have a conversation. A facilitator welcomes them into the space which contains a table and chairs, structure with a roll of topics to discuss and a voice recorder. When the group is seated, the facilitator asks them to rip the next topic of the roll and discuss it. While the group is discussing, the facilitator records and makes sure they stay within a twenty minute timeframe. When the group has finished conversing each member suggests a new topic that they want other groups to talk about. The discussion has no leader so the conversation is free to travel as far as it desires from its original departing point.
Members of the groups come unprepared to the discussion with out knowing the topic beforehand. These circumstances can be intimidating but freeing at the same time as those who normally speak loudest might have to listen and listeners might have to speak depending on the topic at hand. The project brings to light subjects that people are currently occupied with, contemporary spoken language and conversational traditions.
The conversations were archived with participant anonymity, the only information added was date and place.
An excerpt from a conversation the 4th of May 2017 at Iceland University of the Arts:
- Ok, serious discussion about whale hunting.
- I think the problem is that many native people just have it in their tradition, it's been there forever and it's stupid to try to convince them that it's against nature
- I was reading an article that 70 percent of the whales that are eaten in Iceland are eaten by tourists.
- Aren’t you a vegetarian?
- Yeah I was but since I’ve been in Iceland I’ve started eating fish, two days ago I puked because I ate tuna.
- Did you decide to be a vegetarian because of the animals?
- I think it was but more because of the environment and I don't like the capturing and holding of the animals but yeah.
- It's just that, I don’t know, I’m a vegan but I haven’t been eating a lot of vegan things in Iceland because I don't think it is sustainable to be vegan in Iceland. I should just eat seaweed.
- Yes you should, in Chile you eat seaweed straight from the ocean, it’s not a thing everybody does but it's a thing that your grandma tells you to do and you just do it and you don't remember why.
- It's better to wash it and dry right?
- No you can make something like sushi, it's not an European thing, it's more Latin American thing. And there’s like a really long coast in Chile.
- But aren’t there a lot of jungles in Chile?
