if the four people moving away down the track in the dusk are returning to the light of a tent, or heading deeper into the marsh –

the sometimes mobile sometimes static observer / recorder is being left behind. is it the failure of the others for a crucial period to notice their absence which ensures they are lost? because they themselves at the crucial moment inexplicably / inevitably equally do not call out, allowing a fatal distance to accumulate. all this time the group, far from holding the missing person in mind, seem to be talking together about something else

call them 'famille rogue'

thinking about wiped out (2001), which was a return to work, the way Jeff Wall or Jérôme Bel seem to have returned to the work of dance or image making after periods of abandonment. wiped out made its way via a reading of the poem by Francis Ponge in which a cluster of blackberries (mûres), unevenly ripened, is characterised as a famille rogue figuratively filled with ink. the cluster of berries is proposed as a motley family grouping: disparate, mixed, semi opaque

picking berries at Green Dale a few days ago, then finding the Ponge collection on a shelf with signéponge, then the London riots and unrest – ambiguous outgrowths in the urban landscape we don't know what fruits will come of

what it could mean to work with in the family: that seemingly so fixed constellation. to invest so heavily in that as an experiment.

from the seemingly most conventional starting point, where the big f amily underwrites the production of the big s elf / ubject..

just the title O Pioneers! captures your fascination and exasperation with all that. those endlessly energetic homesteaders and heads of household. Pa with his fiddle. leading their captive audiences into every kind of danger and deprivation

proposing, by a series of rough, inconclusive, contradictory actions, barely interventions, to take the household as a site of social and artistic experimentation. to take the house as an experimental building and relationships in the household as a growing place for new collectives. to work with the self / subject / individual as a thing deeply rooted in the small f amily as experiential field / material

meaning that everything is at stake in the fabric of the every day: barely perceptible, ephemeral, verging on nothing. the documents of that time are correspondingly fleeting and incomplete, captured by accident as background or interference

on one side a familiar sense of belonging is reiterated: the quotidian, the everyday and -night are the ground of a domestic fabric. identifying with the others as they are moving away, being drawn to them. on another side, there is a sense of something expectant and unsure

– at this low, almost imperceptible level, if it can become possible to sense the seeding of unexpected forms. taking the family as the basic collective, where you are told exactly what to expect, by turning it inside out, what can be exposed in terms of radical openness and uncertainty in a small band like that. really a surprising bunch. sprouting and spreading. never reproducing true to type