The Messenger: London

Dora García
Messenger: Chloe Sach
18 September 2015 - 28 March 2016

A performer or agent becomes the messenger by agreeing to participate in García’s project in their city. The messenger receives and memorises an audio message in a language he/she can neither understand nor identify. The performer only knows that this language is spoken by a community in their city. The messenger embarks on a quest to identify the language and to find someone who can reveal the meaning of the message; only then is the performance completed.

The agent is not allowed to search the message on the internet, but only ‘in the field’. What matters most is not the meaning of the message, but the journey and encounters that result from this search. The main quality of the agent is therefore the capacity to narrate this search for meaning through daily diary entries that are published on The Messenger website. This narration tells the public above all about the social, human and historical characteristics of the area where the performance takes place, its inhabitants, and the relations they establish among each other. The messenger will accompany their narrative with pictures they take along the way. In the messenger's diary, the public learns as much about the search for the recipient of the message as about the messenger's daily life and opinions.

García asks the agent to embark on this project in ‘low intensity mode’. This means that the task of finding someone who can understand and translate the message is not performed as a priority task during some exceptional days, but as a journey that integrates with the daily activities of the performer. The performer therefore does not exclusively devote their time to being the messenger, rather, this activity is done along the lines of a life and lasts potentially as long as it takes to find a recipient for the message.

The Messenger is an ongoing project that has taken place in Brussels (2002), Paris, Barcelona (2006), Metz, Hong Kong, Copenhagen (2008), Nice, Toulouse, Guadalajara (2010), London (2015) and Chicago (2017).

The Messenger full diary.

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