“Take to your Bed: an experimental site-specific live art event”
triage live art collective
11 Apr → 13 Apr 2012
Take To Your Bed is an experimental, site-specific live art event that will take place on 11, 12 and 13 April, 12 – 4pm in the public foyer area of 225 Bourke Street, Melbourne. The project will seek to disrupt ‘normality’ by offering members of the public thirty minutes of bed-rest in a busy public space.
Take to your Bed invites anyone who wishes to engage in public resting/sleeping/napping/loafing (as a subversive act in the CBD) to step forward. Historically, the act of ‘taking to your bed’ is most strongly connected to the culture and people of Ireland. The Irish have been known to take to their beds for hours, weeks, months and even years due to grief, civil disobedience, illness, despair or simply the inability to cope with life as it is. To this day the tradition is a socially acceptable response to the unacceptable – and it is this radical aspect of ‘taking to your bed’ that triage seeks to playfully explore at Westspace.
Take To Your Bed is a critique of ‘progressive’ capitalist agendas, the control of our time by work, the constant demands of societal/family commitments and the tyranny of social media. In response to such universal pressures the staff of triage will encourage participants to take to their beds lightly, for fun, and in public over three days. Bed-guests can sit in bed with a teddy, have a story read to them, sleep, listen to music, order a cuppa (how they like it), have their photo taken or dedicate their rest to a good cause. In the sweetest possible way we’d like to help you take you to your bed.
NB: mobile phones are strictly prohibited in the rest zone.
Artist biographies:
Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy is the founder and creative director of triage live art collective. She is a director, writer, performer and dramaturge whose creative agenda embraces live art, classical text-based works, video and installation. Having completed the stranger series in 2012 she is now developing several large-scale works with public institutions. Katerina is currently lecturing at RMIT University.
Melanie Jame Walsh has collaborated with triage since 2008. Her most recent work with the collective includes Strange Passions and An Appointment with J Dark on which she was the lead artist. Working between Berlin, the UK and Melbourne, Melanie Jame is an interdisciplinary performance artist and the creative director of savage amusement.
triage live art collective