MANUAL Oulu
11.9. – 15.9.
Adam Kinner & Christopher Willes
Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes create performances that explore unusual states of sensory awareness. Their work is often staged in public spaces, and informed by an interest in immersive sound, listening, audience perspective, and the possibilities of participatory art. They created MANUAL in collaboration with Montreal-based dance artist Hanna Sybille Müller.
ANTI encourages its audience to visit Oulu – European Capital of Culture! MANUAL is an experiential one-on-one work presented at the Oulu Central Library. The work is produced by the ILME Cultural Cooperative.
MANUAL invites participants to arrive on site with instructions to meet a stranger in a particular place. From there they are silently led through a series of subtle events, following written notes and immersive audio in headphones. They walk through the space and listen together. They look at books and read to each other. Sounds and images found in the library combine and blur. And as the piece progresses the materials come to form a manual for slowing down.
Intermingling with the daily life of the library, MANUAL reflects on the act of listening and the intimacy of reading with another person in a public space. Through a carefully guided participatory experience, the piece invites viewers to engage with the library as a site of deep sensory awareness, and to reflect on the social and technological conditions of shared attention.
MANUAL Oulu is the result of a collaborative process between ILME and the ANTI Festival, which aimed to co-curate an international artwork for a public space.