ABOUT
Junkology, a collaboration between Every house has a door and artist Fari Shams, nests within an exhibition. It proposes a performance-game with a degree of participation from the audience, resulting in a modular playground, reconfigured by each performance, and an archive of foundational texts and images.
After the performance, we invite everyone to explore and rearrange the result. We thought about architectures of play within urban space. We thought about the social relations that arise in direct physical engagement—as direct as possible, restraining electronic mediation—with the concrete concerns of a material environment.
We structured our performance as a game of chance.
Two choreographed stagehands build this playground, Bryan and Jake Saner, father-and-son team, demonstrating intergenerational skills of carpentry, choreography, and the kind of play for which the rules need to be invented.
We have invented these rules and following them is our public experiment. Because Johan Huizinga wrote of how we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of humanity to live in beauty, and that “There is no satisfying this need save in play;” and because Gertrude Stein said, “Whatever you can play with is yours.”