Ghost Quarters is a performance installation exploring the experience of destitution, addiction and the spatial uncanny.
This work is part of an overarching investigation, The Opium Confessions, exploring new approaches to the artistic communication of sensory and emotional states. This body of work is initiated by writer Jane Goodall and performer Tess de Quincey in partnership with sound designer Ian Stevenson and video artist Sam James. Ghost Quarters includes a collaboration with poet/vocalist Amanda Stewart and composer Chris Abrahams and is produced by De Quincey Co.
Concept
The work is inspired by the writings of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859): poet, opium addict, wandering adventurer, genius of the imagination. Ghost Quarters focuses on how human beings experience interior and exterior space. During his teenage years, De Quincey ran away from school and lived rough in the Welsh and English countryside for many months as he made his way to London on foot. This experience of destitution gave him an estranged relationship to interior space, and a fascination with architecture as wilderness. It also led him to addiction and hallucination.
Ghost Quarters draws on his post-traumatic visions to experiment with uncanny spatial relationships for a contemporary audience. Now, the home as a primary symbol of domestic and economic security is at risk and increasing numbers of people experience the anxiety states associated with homelessness. Yet these states can also teach us to know the world as a larger reality, a place of vastness and uncertainty, in which changing weathers are the governors of daily life.
Performance Space Residency 2007
involved explorations around the literary works of Thomas De Quincey
by Tess de Quincey & Jane Goodall
with Sam James, Amanda Stewart & Chris Abrahams
The Opium Confessions was the first stage of creative development for a new performance and media work. The exploration centres around the figure of Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) whose literary reputation is based primarily on two works, The Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) and On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, an essay written in 1827. These will form the backbone for a series of new performance works.
Video stills by Sam James
