Zurich Rituals (In Oth­er Words Sym­posi­um), 2009

Per­form­ance

Cli­ents: The pub­lic audience

Loc­a­tion: Kun­sthalle Zürich, Switzerland

Ques­tions: Where do phys­ic­al­ity and lan­guage inter­sect? What do you think about met­em­psy­chos­is (the trans­mi­gra­tion of souls)?

Ques­tion: Where do phys­ic­al­ity and lan­guage intersect?

Mar­cus Coates: Quite excit­ing. Very bright light, noth­ing but this light – not neces­sar­ily a lovely exper­i­ence. There was really noth­ing – no sense of the floor or any walls. I have to move. Walk­ing, walk­ing. The white star­ted to turn into tex­ture. Snow – it felt incred­ibly light, a slight res­ist­ance all over me. A smell, strong, like tan­ger­ines, very vivid. Could smell an orange col­our in front of me but it was totally white. Con­tra­dic­tion between smelling and see­ing. Car­ried on. Smell is stronger. Walk­ing towards coast. Small sea birds – like pen­guins / cor­mor­ants, but smal­ler. Cres­ted auk­lets, smelling like oranges. The auk­lets smell to identi­fy them­selves and their colony, to dis­tin­guish from oth­er birds – a phys­ic­al lan­guage. Lan­guage and phys­ic­al pres­ence do not inter­sect. They are the same thing – no point where they meet. They start off the same.

Ques­tion asked by an audi­ence mem­ber and Coates’s response dur­ing the Zurich Rituals, Kun­sthalle Zürich, 2009