Spare Room (2014)

Spare Room (2014)

Performance
45 mins

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From the cavernous vaults of Toxteth Reservoir, Adam Chodzko presents a performance: a talk, about space, materials and desire, a proposition set in the future, that draws together Liverpool Docks’ (specifically, Peel Ports’) plans for massive expansion in order to attain a greater role in global cargo shipping, together with the reality of shrinking domestic space, clipping in video games, a modified IKEA wardrobe and the sole of a Nike trainer.
Chodzko traces the assumptions and contradictions inherent in relentless infrastructural expansion and brings these speculative logistics into collision with our domestic material and economic realities. What psychological sense of space might inevitably emerge from these disparities?
Developing his ongoing ideas surrounding human behaviour’s forming through dissolution, flow and exchange as well as proposing a radical shift in how art might be made in the future Chodzko moves his narrative between fact and fantasy. With two ships’ rats giving guidance from a screen and with the artist eventually speaking from inside a wardrobe crudely adapted into ‘clothing’, Chodzko evolves the conclusion that, for most of us, our affordable domestic space will contract to the point of having to physically disappear into the materials that we seem to think that we need to possess.  Equally, the lack of space for increasing imported supplies of goods renders the Peel Port expansion a project without a true demand and therefore must exist instead as one of the world’s largest pieces of Land Art.

Originally performed:  2nd October 2014.

Part of Thinking City, a programme of artist-led events that take place in private and public spaces across Liverpool. Thinking City is a collaboration between Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University.

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Related works:

A ‘Haywain’ Moment      (2014)      
The House of Beautifully Earned Trust   [Muster Station]    (2018)
Synthetic Copse: Our Ash Hospital    (2018)      
Whitstable Interiors    (2003)
Rising   (2013)
Longshore drift, early detroit techno and other processes of erosion    (2006)  
Proxigean Tide      [exhibition at Tate St Ives]     (2008)
A Hostile Environment   (2019)
Settlement    (2004)
The Quarantine Ship (2013)