Corin Sworn

Silent Sticks
2015
Whitechapel Gallery, Fondazione Maramotti
A mixed media installation staging the emergence of the professional actor in the early modern period.  The work foregrounds radically new aspects of performance and labour from the 1500s as operational today.  Early modern itinerant actors explored the legibility of role and place as a fluctuating assembly of shifting aesthetic surgaces by employing costume and props to shift character and evoke far off locations within the immediate present.  Silent Sticks works into these potentials of protean reinvention aligning them with late capitalist ideals of malleability in which all areas of life become performance related.





The research highlights the strategies of early modern itinerant players for rehearsing identity, performance and credibility and explores their relevance for understanding precarious labour in our own time.  Employing common objects as props, the gallery stages one period through another therby showing the present-day as both different form, and yet redolent of, preceding historical periods.  In keeping with early commedia dell’arte theatricals, literary, historical and economic themes are interwoven to test understandings of fact in rehearsals of fiction.

Silent Sticks is a sculptural installation with 4-channel sound and two 20 minute HD videos.  The work was commissioned by Collezione Maramotti following Sworn being awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2013.