It’s not who you are, it’s how you are | Atomik Architecture

In 2015 we won an international competition run by Blueprint Magazine to work with an emerging artist at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art as part of the Baltic Ryder Commission. We were given an unusually open brief, and an opportunity to put into practice some of our thinking about creative relationships. We chose to collaborate with Alice Theobald, a performance and video artist, whose practice often references clichés and ‘slippages’ in language. Her approach appealed to our sense of the uncanny, but also seemed to offer the potential to explore broader ideas about how we inhabit space. The finished installation takes familiar, domestic materials – in this case fifty three duvets – and uses them to enclose a series of vaguely unsettling spaces, structured by circular timber towers. Applied texts, projections – of pre-recorded sequences improvised by actors on the central platform of the installation – and live performances in the space create further disorientation, upsetting the boundaries between performer and viewer.