‘Carpet Territory’ is a project created by artist-researcher group, Cat Auburn, Alan Lynn and Jessica Ramm (ALR). The project’s first iteration appeared in video format at the ADD+ART virtual conference hosted by the University of Barcelona in July 2021. A second iteration was shown as a physical exhibition in October 2021 at 36 Lime Street Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK).
ALR. ‘Carpet Territory’. 2021. moving image. 9.52 mins
Carpet Territory
Auburn, Lynn and Ramm (ALR) are an artist-researcher group with deep interests in ‘the ability to know’ and structures that undermine that ability. They create work at the intersection of their research interests and practices: the slippery process of remembering, borrowing, erasing, forgetting and re-discovering.
‘Carpet Territory’ is the culmination of a year-long digital collaboration in which ALR explore the fear of physical and ethical contagion. This fear flows from an awareness of the struggles associated with late capitalism and contradictions we face whilst trapped in systems that command our complicity.
ALR use an Oriental rug as a provocation to work through theoretical and ethical concerns surrounding contradictions present in objects, narratives, embodiment, and identity. In particular, they address the performative metaphor of ‘trying to get off the carpet upon which we stand’ (an impossibility), and ‘pulling the rug out from underneath someone’ (a betrayal). Working within the wider context of the pandemic necessitated a shift into a technological space in which ALR’s bodies were constrained. The result is a series of art objects and a video in which three autotheoretical protagonists adopt distinct personas roughly characterised as ‘Compromised, ‘Contaminated’ and ‘Thwarted’ as they grapple with their awareness of an unspecified malignant presence.
As ALR’s collaboration develops, their research-based artistic concerns continue to question whether the necessity to act, make a mark in the world and be recognised is irreconcilable with the necessity to not transgress, not act in bad faith and to not spread contagion once aware of one’s own role
ALR. Carpet Territory (Lesley on the Carpet). 2021. digital photograph. 1060 x 800mm
