Kirsten Lavers

The Hull piece spread through five rooms of a working hotel. Both artists had worked in residency inviting people to come and talk, trading stories about Hull. The artists found a 19th century notebook of stories collected by a local surgeon, and these also informed the work. The main sites were the garden room, the two cash box rooms and the story room. From the reception office visitors went to the garden room with its grass floor and mounds of objects set in two earth beds that evoked newly covered graves. In two rooms you could open cash boxes to find a tea cup with fresh tea leafs and a number. In the final room, Melanie Thompson waited to tell you the story identified by your number.

So far so good. A familiar working process - developing images and environments from the history of the site - a familiar route through a space, familiar kinds of installation-type objects.

60 cash boxes, 60 numbered key tags, 60 keys, 60 teacups and saucers, 60 miscellaneous objects, 60 stories told and retold, grass, earth, 2 beds, intercoms, 5 hotel rooms, visits and visitors
 
listening, conversing, making tea, telling stories, retelling stories
 
additional performer: Helen Godwin

The real jolt came from the ambivalence of the story room. An intimate space, yet, as Thompson remarked, cold and dark and dank, and a feeling of its occupants having been lonely. Not much lust. But the ambience did also suggest seedy, furtive sexual encounters, and the situation of sitting on the end of a bed being offered a service by this female performer did evoke sexual trade. A further discomforting fact was knowing that the conversation was being relayed by baby alarm intercom to the cash box rooms.
In Prema the Zwillinge Project continues with Episode 7, Upstairs. Again, responding to site, and carrying over information and preoccupations from previous episodes it will be worth visiting for Prema's exceptionally beautiful location, for the artists' wit, the beauty of what they create, and certainly for the dark edge that turns the work on its head.

David Hughes liveartmagazine No 2