Filed under: About Millipede
About Millipede
Millipede is a documentor for the LIFT festival 2008. Millipede continually shifts shapes, grows, shrinks, falls apart and regroups. Millipede is a process: twelve people 14+ have spent 6 Saturday workshops with artist collective, They Are Here, developing and exploring documentary skills in film, sound recording, writing, body-based practice, mapping and surveillance. Millipede draws its inspiration from its name; a creature comprised of many eyes and legs, operating in unison. Millipede, is therefore the workshop participants, They Are Here and anyone else who contributes to our pool of work. Millipede will be present at LIFT Stratford and LIFT Southbank. Millipede has a nest, a physical space you can visit, nearby the LIFT. Millipede is part of the ‘LIFT Living Archive’; and its produce will become part of the LIFT archive.
Millipede will create 999 pieces of work in response to the festival. Piece 1000 will be made communally with everyone in the LIFT on the Southbank on July 4th (2 -4pm). After which all 1000 pieces will be shown. Millipede is interested in playing with the classical notions of an archive: hence the emphasis on many points of view, a mode of presentation that is temporary and contingent – that will allow for the 1000 pieces to be looked at re-categorized differently in the future. Millipede intends to create an online bank of its material – accessible to everyone. Millipede loves the potential of its work being remixed, re-coloured, turned upside down, inserted, clipped, copied, cropped and reappearing in other people’s work, projects, and archives… Shards of one archive becoming seeds of another’s creativity.
Scientists classify millipedes as detritovores: i.e. they feed off the decomposing, left-over material of others. This can be seen as repulsive but also beautiful. It points toward a way of being where nothing is wasted. Nothing is considered too inconsequential to be absorbed, to be documented, to be remembered. If normally, the archive process of a festival would document the ‘acts’ on stage, we turn our attention to the ‘acts’ off stage, not what event took place, but what was felt about what took place. The refusal to disregard the worth of the slightest moment or gesture is underpinned by a deep respect for the ‘ultra-ordinary’: we don’t throw anything away because there is no rubbish.
Text by They Are Here
