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Un-Looking

Un-Looking is a series of journeys along lines of inspiration. These lines are the marks and shapes found in the architecture and painting of Charles Renee Mackintosh and the journeys are performance events extracted from his work. The body of the performers make cartographic symbols and the performances become a map of his thinking.

 

Each journey has a specific material or process as its starting point so that the response to each building is through costume, choreography, sound, words and drawing. In each case the process is one of un-looking; of seeing backwards through the eyes of Mackintosh into the origins of inspiration. In each case the audience are required to travel, looking at the event alongside the performer and then again by watching the performer through the eyes of the building, looking out of its windows. The performances create a sense that the buildings are alive and that the energy which drove Mackintosh to create them is latent in their physical structures.

 

This is a tactile and visceral series of events that challenges its audience to un-look for themselves and to see the work in a new way. The project also serves to raise awareness of the Mackintosh landscape paintings and help to reconnect them to his monumental buildings in the minds of residents and visitors to Glasgow.

Un-Looking

 

After years of learning how to see

We find ourselves blind and unable

To understand what it is that is

Before us.

 

The shapes and colours form patterns

Whose language escapes cognisance

Defies a logic.

 

We must un-look or look without knowing,

Not presume ownership.

It is not ours to own and

Never will be,

Not never ever,

Ever.

 

So look again and again

Until looking is what you do and so,

After some time, each look becomesA subtraction of knowledge,

Removing that which you think you saw and

Replacing it with what is

There.