Report by Maomì Meindl

The performance at the opening of "Wieoftnoch" happened out of necessity. Nine hours of train delays resulted in the installation of Smoke get's in your eyes becoming a spontaneous performance, or rather an ad hoc installation, witnessed by the opening crowd. The installation was highly rooted in trust among all participating artists: Julian, who picked the flowers, and myself, who attempted to dictate my vision for the flower arrangement online to Andrea. In the context of the performance, she acted as the executor of my instructions. Thrown into the fragility of the `live`, we were asked to perform under the demands of time. These conditions, however, momentarily distorted reality, and the awareness of showing an intimate moment of creation while being surveilled by others was temporarily deleted from my consciousness. In retrospect, I think I am becoming aware of the contemporaneity of this performance. Especially, because fragments and stories were pieced together by the digital, which initially seems contradictory. I say so because when we think of digital devices, we often associate them with fragmentation and alienation, an anxious space that can be challenging to navigate. But in this situation, the digital device became a material of the work as well as an important collaborator that played the role of a generous friend. It delivered a set of instructions to Andrea who materialized my directions, mediating and guiding us through the unknown. Meanwhile, I was wandering around in my studio in London and was completely detached from the performance, occasionally hearing comments from people attending the opening. It felt like Andrea was protecting me from the crowd through our Telegram line whilst I was hiding in my studio. The alienating setup provided me with a quiet retreat to focus on the improvised creation of the work. In a way, it highlights how the digital can transform the process of art-making positively, opening up possibilities of utopian world-building within it. It can bridge fragments, ideas, friendships, conversations, and puzzle abstract pieces of globalization together into one unity.