Petra Johnson: Montage of Small Movements

The exhibition/project “A Montage of Small Movements” invites participants and visitors to explore our selves in relation to place. A choreographic installation, a map and a walk with the artist all serve to pursue a very modest inquiry: ‘Observe an act of kindness on the street’.

Traditional maps show a place that seems to exist independently of being looked at. In this project an open map is made by looking for fields of action in the form of random acts of kindness in the street and to make them equal in value to traditional inputs. The locations identified reconfigures a map covering a radius of 20 minutes walking distance from THE REFORMER: a map that emerges from ephemeral moments registered in passing, moments that energise our affective landscape. As signs of ongoing processes, they are not part of determinant systems, instead these are undeclared yet consequential actions.

Back in the gallery, the project poses a question:

What happens if we look upon kindness as a technology rather than an emotion; a way of producing generosity in the body, a positive affective swirl? If we produce maps of spaces in new sensory registers like geographies of kindness, might these ’geographies …. then leak out into the wider world?’   (Thrift. 2007:230)

Like an apprentice captain on a steamboat, our close observations in the street will accumulate into a body of experience that can read dispositions of flows, swirls and ripples as markers of unfolding potential.

The project is part of a sequence of works by the artist that sample Dada-esquemicrorevolutions for the 21st century.