TYPOLOGY OF CHANCE

CHANCE GALLERY

“So I woke up today, the 19th of August, I put on my slippers at 9.53 am. And I started to fill in my Sudoku, while having my coffee”

As I was solving it, I realized that I should share it with someone else, with everyone. I want my personal to encounter the streets; chance would define the place and time. I left the house with chalk (so that if I get in trouble it’s removable) and a copy of my Sudoku. Followed random citizens until one of them, a teen-aged boy stopped walking and sat down to smoke a cigarette at the corner of Portobello Road. The wall behind him was white, it was perfect to install my thoughts.

After a while a child got curious, she tried to solve it then gave up. Many passing by read and took pictures but didn’t play. Then after a while someone picked up the chock and started… a couple of minutes later some started helping him. They were all discussing it and filling it in. Many people interacted and many people just documented. I played the role of just documenting and my identity was the same as any of them.
No one knew that I was responsible for these encounters.

They encountered my personal chance and they made it their own, on a street wall in London at 4 pm in the afternoon. Some left before the others, some stayed until the end. They were individuals that had never met, and yet they had a chance to meet through this - through a Sudoku, through my Sudoku. The conversations they had created sounds, through their different voices and accents. Shapes, colors, and movements were formed out of their evolution within the space, the invisible stage being in front of the mural. The performance of how they came together was blossoming.

CHANCE GALLERY

Leave a message
Saturday the 7th of August, I wanted to play with the concept of chance through cellular phones – a tool we use on a daily basis and has become indispensable to one’s life to a certain point. It’s a sad fact, but it’s true. I went in search of places where I was given the right to leave a phone unattended and let chance take its course.

I placed two phones around 1 pm. Each one had two numbers saved in its inbox; my personal number and the second phone’s number. It was a play of probability between the three. I left one at a coffee shop named Drawing Room and the other one on a bench outside a shop called Maharishi on Portobello Road. As I was documenting the installation of the phone in the coffee shop, it rang. The bench-phone miscalled the coffee shop phone. I called back, but no one answered.
I went home, and as the day was passing by I called these to locations gambling my chance. No one answered. I didn’t know if they were stolen, if they were still there, if the battery went off. I just kept trying from time to time. At 7.32 pm I get a phone call on my phone. She and I spoke.
However, I will never know if there was a chance encounter between the two found phones. I risked not knowing and I will never know. The time was undefined and the chance of it all was truly undetermined.

CHANCE GALLERY

Having observed, recorded, analyzed, interpreted individual performances and reactions within the city of London, and on a personal level, and as an auditor to ones environment with the interest of chance factors, I began my practical work.

Polaroid and The bus23
On Friday the 28th of July, I woke up, looking at my Polaroid camera. Decision of the tool was taken. Place and time was up to chance. Got dressed, had my breakfast, at 11.06 am I left the flat. My hypothesis of chance was to follow the first person that passes in front of me. I followed him for defining my place. This blond lady, in a red top and black pants, took the bus number 23 from Ladbroke Grove Station; direction Liverpool Station. After a while being on the bus, surrounded by so many people, I started taking pictures of the people seated in front of me or next to me. Then, as they left, I would place their photograph on their seat. The next person that occupied the space was introduced to a picture of their predescessors. At first, when the photographs were few, people would just displace them, and put them elsewhere, or even ask the person seated next to them if they were theirs.

Some sort of communication performance was being established.
With time and turnover of passengers, the audience of this installation that took place in the bus started understanding that they were left with a found library of previous passengers. The chance encounter was through the image. I had written on each Polaroid “found library”. Some people did not notice me where as others did.

The audience was left with images and the feeling of “who was here before me”. This was intended to provoke the thought of the fact that even if there was no physical or real encounter, a trace was still left behind and that made the encounter possible. The location (bus) was constant, the time was defined by the bus stops and traffic of the city, and the performance was based on the passenger that randomly took the bus. Their interaction and sharing of the Polaroids was the prime chance encounter.

Water The Plant

Date: Thursday the 22 of July, 2010
Location: London, Uk, Oxford street


A grey side walk, a multinational nation , sound of languages colliding with different shapes, forms and colors.
Architecture and nature, urbanism and its platform, hunger and faith

will there be an encounter,
will distance suffice,
will there be a break within your ongoing unconscious routine
will one of your senses greet serendipity?

" Hand gesture on a smooth patterned cotton surface resulted with an outside change. A movement was performed. A trace was left behind. Got out of bed, beginning my very well rehearsed morning routine, while that prime thought kept resonating in my mind. My thoughts started gathering ways of understanding surfaces, layers, segments, and objects. The sense of my skin touching the somewhat worm wooden ground in the corridor, lead me to notice my impersonal steps on the streets. Noticed my self walking, surfacing on the earth, this plateau that we have used as a base to all existence by default. I observe all these lines, shapes, formed assemblage that establish the city. "

I Stumble upon a muse in the city

London, Uk, Notting Hill, London, Uk, on the 6/7/2010




"Le déjeuner sur l'herbe", by Édouard Manet