During the late 1980s, students from Moscow’s Zagorsky school for Deafblind children paid several visits to the studio of avant-garde sculptor Vadim Sidur to handle artworks as part of an experiment in perceptual learning, led by psychologist Alexander Meshcheryakov. He had proposed that the stimulation of curiosity, through shared action involving objects, might offer the basis for the development of language, social values and conceptual thinking. “Shared action involving objects,” Meshcheryakov proclaimed, “may be the tiny cell from which sprouts the whole of human behavior and mentality.”

Tactile Dialogues [Shared Action] (2016) was a public, participatory performance led by Fayen d’Evie and Irina Povolotskaya on the outskirts of Moscow, outside the Research Institute for Human Morphology, where a monument by Vadim Sidur is sited, Structure #1 (1976).

Participatory performance

Human Commonalities

V.A.C. & State Museum of Vadim Sidur, Moscow

10 Sep - 30 Oct 2016

Curators: Anna Ilchenko and Yaroslav Alyoshin.

Participating artists:

Emanuel Almborg, Yuri Albert, Tatiana Basilova, Amanda Cachia, Maria Chekhonadskih, Keti Chukhrov, Fayen d’Evie, Asta Gröting, Simon Hayhoe, Alexander Kondakov, Andrey Maidanskiy, Darrin Martin, David Mitchell, Valery Podoroga, Irina Povolotskaya, Robert McRuer, Sharon Snyder, Alexandra Sukhareva, Alexander Suvorov, Sadie Wilcox, Elena Yarskaia-Smirnova.

Human Commonalities was an interdisciplinary study of the V.A.C. Foundation which included an exhibition, performances, film screenings and open talks. Its aim was not just to discuss how to integrate people with disabilities into the cultural process, but to form a theoretical basis for artistic practices linked to the topic of disability, and also to find strategies to help make artistic sense of these issues.

The development, enactment and aftermath of the performance Tactile Dialogues [Shared Action] 2016 is described in the paper ‘Orienting Through Blindness: Blundering, Be-Holding and Wayfinding as Artistic and Curatorial Methods’, Performance Paradigm, Issue 13, 2017.

Excerpt:

“…A few days before the performance, I visited the monument to practice the score with Povolotskaya. We discovered that the area in which Structure #1 was located had been repurposed as a carpark. The surfaces of the monument were peeling and cracked, and an excavator was parked at one end beside a hole dug for sewerage repairs. The hole was large enough and deep enough for a small crowd to stumble into. The Curator of the State Museum of Vadim Sidur, who had accompanied us on the site visit, was dismayed by the advanced degeneration of the work. He talked of the role that scientists had played in commissioning non-official artworks prior to the 1990s, and the precarious fate of those works after the collapse in funding of the science institutes following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

On the day of the performance, temperatures hovered around 6 degrees Celcius (43 F), with flurries of ice rain. But the hole had been backfilled, and the small crowd that had showed up had been issued with rain ponchos and promised hot tea afterwards, so we gamely launched into a performative experiment in evolving a conversation through touch. We started with attentiveness to the present moment, and sensing the air shift as we moved our feet up and down, an adaptation to fend off the bitter cold. We arranged our bodies as a dialogue circle, one behind another. Treating the back of the person in front as a canvas, through touch alone, we each described what had attracted or compelled us to the encounter and our first impressions of the place. Simultaneously drawing and being drawn upon, we paid attention to the sensations of speaking through touch, and the sensations of embodied listening. We noticed pressure and resistance, and the vibrations of conversation.

With Povolotskaya leading, we formed a chain of contact and began to map the space around Structure #1, experimenting with angles of approach. The size of the monument created heat differentials, which Povolotskaya navigated to move closer to the surface of the artwork, and to trace the perimeter of the monument. We paused from time to time to form dialogue circles, to develop narratives through touch, evolve tactile vocabularies, and to calibrate the movement dynamics of conversation. We reflected on how the people and objects in that space had shifted and rearranged over the lifetime of the work, as well as what is valued, what matters. We surrounded the work, ran our hands over the scrapes, the cracks and the patches of smoothness, feeling for textural expanses and discontinuities. I asked people to think beyond the reach of their body, to lean into the work, to sink into its hollows. When we stepped back from Sidur’s Structure #1, our final tactile dialogues centred on what we would take away, and what would be left behind, once we shifted our attention elsewhere.

As hot tea was dispersed, people chatted—via translations amongst Russian, English, Russian sign language, and Russian dactyl—about touch and personal space, the weathering and material erosion of the work, financial decay, and climatic shifts, political and ecological… “