Pyr(rH)ic Solution Books 1 - 3
pyric: caused by or related to burning
pyrrhic: victory (gained at too great cost like that of Pyrrhus 279 BC)
This series of site-specific and durational performances involved the burning of individuals’ names from three books that had served as a means for staff communication within an emergency winter nightshelter for homeless people. The nightshelter (managed by Kirsten Lavers) had operated during the winter of 97/98 in a redundant victorian library.
Before this unique social document could become available for public reading the confidentiality of the people named in the text had to be addressed. To burn a hole in one side of a double-sided notebook, necessarily creates bizarre erasures on the other side. As such the disruption of the surface logics of the text acquired both new urgencies and losses.
As each name was burnt away the people whose confidentiality was being honoured were fictionalised - judge, company director, truck driver, lucky winner, youngest son - and inserted into a live and recorded reading of the book. Process and product plugged into each other at every stage of the three durational performances unravelling towards the gestural closure of perfect binding.
pyr(rh)ic solution # book one was performed in the artist’s studio, October 1998
pyr(rh)ic solution # book two was performed at eXpo 98 The Boots Library, Nottingham. Video document exhibited as part of Live Culture at Tate Modern March 2003
pyr(rh)ic solution # book three was performed at 'In The Event Of The Text - Ephemeralities Of Writing' the second international symposium on writing & performance in Utrecht, Netherlands April 1999
What is solved when a homeless person borrows a bed for the night in a building that used to be a library?
What is resolved when their name is burnt from the pages of a book written in a building that used to be a library?
What is possible when this book is read?