“WARM ARCHIVE”
Stacey Collee, Andrea Illés and Alice Tsiavos
22 Apr → 21 May 2023
Window

People watching a person speaking to the microphone in front of a screen, footage displaying real time by the other person filming her with a camcorder.
Stacey Collee, Andrea Illés, Alice Tsiavos, 'WARM ARCHIVE', 2023, performance, West Space Window, Collingwood Yards. Photography by Aras Petrasiunas.

WARM ARCHIVE is a duration performance by three artists in collaboration, Stacey Collee, Andrea Illés, and Alice Tsiavos.

WARM ARCHIVE emerges from an aspiration to uncover alternative methods for processing contested language. Conscious of the futility of responding to language of this kind, the artists explore digestion as an approach to consuming texts that are critical of their bodies.

They inhabit the West Space Window for a period of three weeks, a site that frames them within a place of public scrutiny and institutional surveillance. During this time, Stacey, Andrea and Alice consume and disarrange the words found in texts that seek to limit or erase transness, finding poetry and choreography in reformation and recontextualisation.

The forth and final week acts as a post-script period, with the artists materialising their research into a body of work in the Window.

WARM ARCHIVE is an iterative collaboration between artists Andrea Illés, Alice Tsiavos, and Stacey Collee. Connected through their experiences within institutional spaces, their collaboration translates found texts into physical performance using digestion as both ethos and methodology. Beginning in 2022, WARM ARCHIVE exists through myriad moments of discussion, analysis and connection, recently coalescing into a month-long performance installation in the West Space Window.

The West Space Window is supported by City of Yarra through their Annual Arts Grants Program.

A figure lingers inside of a shallow window space holding sheets of text and a microphone. Behind them are further bodies of small text - highlighted, handwritten and typed. The figure leans to one side uncomfortably.
A cam corder is suspended in the shallow corner of a window display. On its screen you can identify a figure, that it is presumably filming. On both sides of the wall behind it are bodies of hand written text in pink and red, printed and scribbled over/edited.
The hand of a figure with shiny turquoise nails uses a pink highlighter to write a large capitalised body of text on the a white, brightly lit piece of wall.
The hands of a figure with long turquoise nails uses a pink highlighter to edit a sheet of text.
A figure lingers inside of a shallow window space holding sheets of text and a microphone. Behind them are further bodies of small text - highlighted, handwritten and typed. The figure leans to one side uncomfortably.
A screen projects a close up of a face of an individual holding a microphone. They have thick eyeliner on a deep red lipstick. Someone physically holds up the screen for viewing. There are out-of-focus people in the backdrop.
A figure sits cross-legged in a black singlet and black pants reading from printed text with a microphone. Behind them is a crowd of people - half sitting half standing, intensely listening. They are in an open outdoor foyer, at night time. Walls behind them are brick.
A figure in a green singlet and sequin shirt hold a microphone with a very melencholic expression, eyes downward, wearing thick eyeliner and deep red lipstick.
3 figures, sitting cross-legged. One figure has their back to the camera with a cam-corder filming another individual holding a sheet of text and a microphone. There is another figure in a green singlet in the circle of three. They watch the person with the microphone. It seems to be dark outside.
A figure gazing upward behind a window stares at an orange marker as an anonymous person's hand writes the word 'Dynamic' on the window in front of their face. The person behind the window is holding some paper with chunks of printed text and hand written notes in pink highlighter.
A person holding a camcorder in the display window, with another person filming outside the window with a phone.

Andrea Illés is a performance artist whose auto portraits explore the relational chasm between self and other. Merging dance, text, sound, and video, her enquiry emerges from the agony and bliss she feels being perceived and, often working with states of overwhelm, Andrea is interested in the possibilities found when bodies fail.

Alice Tsiavos is a performance artist in Naarm/Melbourne.

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