Interview with Cally Spooner

Cally Spooner is one of the most interesting figures in performance art today. Winner of the illy Present Future Prize at Artissima, Turin in 2017, she challenges object performativity while overcoming the binary definition of theater and anti-theater.

Cally Spooner often refers to herself as a writer; in fact, her last exhibition at the new location of Milan’s Galleria Zero… can be considered as a widespread script for a crime novel. Her exhibition Dead Time ran from 25.10.2018 to 22.12.2018, concurrently with her other show Everything Might Spill at Castello di Rivoli in Turin.
On display, crime evidences in the form of plastic bags containing papers hanged on a partition. On the papers are drawings of human bodies with their heads erased, a fictional conversation with Kevin Spacey, phone screenshot printings. From the other side of the partition, a score by a choir of voices singing “Mother” repeatedly is played by a speaker. The decision to leave the windows open lets the city invade the exhibition, which investigates the multiple declinations of the concept of dead time, starting from its definition as the time that a measuring detector uses to perform a new survey, after receiving an external impulse.

Cally Spooner in planning an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. What follows is our interview with her.

Cally Spooner, Dead Time (2018)
installation view,
incomplete partition wall, score of 63 elements (inkjet prints, marker and pen on paper, pencil and ink on technical
paper, plastic wallets), 1 x Bose 5 second-generation Virtually Invisible® single cube speaker, audio of nonprofessional,
hastily assembled choir, amplifier, open windows, road outside. 15 meters, 4’31″ loop.
Courtesy the artist and ZERO… Gallery Milano.
Photocredit: Roberto Marossi

MARCO ANTELMI – How does the concept of dead time relate to your work? Does it refer to the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, too?

CALLY SPOONER – I understand Dead Time primarily, but not only, as the cinematic trope Temps Mort, one of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinematic techniques. Here, in an allegedly ‘dead’ moment, where there is no planned action, no acting, perhaps an empty room, Antonioni keeps the camera running. In the running camera, the long shot, unexpected occurrences, as well as an intense stillness, a period of waiting, perhaps a gestation, unfold. This reveals otherwise overlooked details; hidden, difficult to spot, difficult to locate slow time, which very often is hard to control, not easy to transact, master, and certainly not easy to stay with.

I’ve been trying to expand on the term “Temps Mort” to include and consider other hidden or disavowed temporalities or labours such as the day-to-day maintenance and care of a society but also one’s body, such as grit, resilience, patience, duration, stillness, trust, non-action and the desire for the unexpected. I’ve also been using the concept of “Temps Morts” to ask how and where, in our present neoliberal and techno-capitalist climate, the potentialities of unplanned, under-acknowledged, less-controlled life, life-drives and vitality are extinguished, and it subsequently becomes difficult to tell the difference between what is alive and dead.

MA – So, can we see Dead Time as a performance tutorial?

CS – Yes! A very urgent one, that needs to arrive slowly and carefully.

Cally Spooner, Dead Time (2018), detail.
Courtesy the artist and ZERO… Gallery Milano
Photocredit: Roberto Marossi

MA – “Dead time” is also the recharging time for the flash of the camera. In Dead Time, you present screenshots and WhatsApp photos. What is your relationship with technology?

CS – My relationship is quite distanced. I am not a technologist, but I do study how technology is used, regulated or not, financialized, and where it impacts daily life in sinister and imperceptible ways. I am looking within it for the moments when a rigid, productivist temporality, that constantly projects us into the future, a place where we are not, hooks up with technology and becomes exacerbated.

Figuring out ways to future-proof outcomes is the essence of advanced computation. This is the capability to model, predict and thus control the outcome of events. It’s the logic on which the digital age is premised. Pervasive logic today is that the future is something that can be predicted and modelled if only enough data can be gathered. Data science and predictive software means that our day to day activities are based around anticipating or predicting the future more, thereby undoing the fear of not knowing what is going to happen which can create a highly managed, self-managed, form of life that I do not agree with and do not wish to be subsumed by.

Cally Spooner, Dead Time (2018), detail.
Courtesy the artist and ZERO… Gallery Milano
Photocredit: Roberto Marossi

Within this climate, I’m interested in unearthing or opening up practices that manage to engage in hidden, present-tense temporalities, which are embedded in the labour of rehearsal, attempting, continuing, persisting, staying, enduring and waiting. This is a present tense time. It requires patience and concentration, love of detail and the unexpected, and care.

MA – Why do you choose to erase faces in your choreography sketches?

CS – It was something to do with thinking about how, in productivist and future-oriented projects, attitudes and solutions — as well as time and life spent in the pockets of techno-capitalism and its techno giants — the body can often go missing. Or rather it can get left behind, in favor of the speculating, future-oriented brain. The body is an enormous source of alternative, unfathomable knowledge. It can help us so much. But this knowledge does not hook up so well with Silicon Valley-style solutionism, which is infiltrating all our lives. So, I reversed the trend and scratched out their heads. Left the body to take care of itself.

MA – Do you think that dead time can be a solution to acceleration of time?

CS – Yes! Really, I do. I think it helps us practice a more focused, concentrated, curious stewardship of ourselves, one another and this will eventually spill out into taking better stewardship globally, climatically, economically and politically.

Cally Spooner, Dead Time (2018), detail.
Courtesy the artist and ZERO… Gallery Milano
Photocredit: Roberto Marossi

MA – How is Dead Time at Galleria Zero… connected to Everything Might Spill at Castello di Rivoli?

CS – They belong to the same body of work. They are parts of my new crime novel in progress. The crime is committed in many different ways. The victim, witness and killer are one and the same. But I can tell you that the crime itself is very simple. It’s that, today, it is often very hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead, under corporate capitalism’s infiltration of neoliberalism, liberalism and technology, and its subsequent poisoning of the commons. This is really a murder in the making. My two exhibitions render that murder as an absurdist fiction, in a bid to speak of it, somehow.

Cally Spooner, Dead Time (2018), detail.
Courtesy the artist and ZERO… Gallery Milano
Photocredit: Roberto Marossi