EVENT PREVIEW
THE ELASTIC TEST PROJECT
Friday, April 11
Nickle Arts Museum
Mountain Standard Time 2
What qualifies someone to become a citizen and how is the human experience quantified by government? Those are the questions University of South Florida professors Rozalinda Borcila and Robert Lawrence explore during a workshop/performance called The Elastic Test Project (TETP).
Borcila is an assistant professor of performance art and the head of the three-dimensional arts area at USF, while Lawrence is the director of the Electronic Media Program. They bring TETP to Calgary for its third incarnation, following performances in Houston and Johannesburg.
"The idea initially was to look at ways in which the foreigner is evaluated or categorized," says Borcila. "This is, of course, a problematic process, and one that may reveal much about hidden preconceptions, insecurities and vulnerabilities."
She notes that immigration statutes attempt to outline principles that define the foreigner and outline the criteria for naturalization in broad or abstract ways. These abstractions then get quantified or objectified through various procedures that determine how the foreigner can become a citizen.
"The project began with my interest in absurdly inventing rigorous or objective ‘tests’ to establish one’s worthiness for citizenship," she says.
Using Canadian law and the Nickle Arts Museum’s collections as inspiration for the workshop, elements of national context and local influence will be examined. By looking at these criteria, TETP sheds light on the ways that people are either excluded from or admitted into a particular society. For this incarnation of the project, Borcila says that she and Lawrence were fascinated by the fact that Canadian immigration law is written in terms of economic valuation, or human capital (as opposed to, say, U.S. law, which contains numerous metaphors of moral character).
"The Nickle has an extensive and historically significant numismatic collection. Currencies have historically served to authorize power, to commemorate leaders and, in the case of Canadian history, to establish independence," Borcila says. "Our project combines these two systems of valuation – from numismatics and immigration."
With the help of a group of students from Alberta College of Art and Design and the University of Calgary, Borcila and Lawrence will workshop TETP for one week and then perform it at the Nickle. They will introduce the idea of socializing as performance and will set up directed improvisational situations for group interactions.
"Audience members will become the performance," says Borcila. "We will use workshop participants as collaborators, as ‘evaluating agents’ to divide the audience according to pre-given criteria, setting up specific rules: sets of questions, a points/rewards system, spatial divisions within the gallery, rules of transit from one location to the next, etc. During this social negotiation, however, what at first seem to be fixed or objective value systems, extracted from monetary systems or immigration law, will at times become ‘elastic.’ This is as much as I can reveal." |
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