Lizzie Lloyd | Acts of Transfer
Borrowing its title from a chapter in Diana Taylor’s book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), Acts of Transfer is a project about returns, re-enactments, repetitions, and retellings. A collaboration between artist Katy Beinart and writer Lizzie Lloyd, Acts of Transfer documents and reactivates a selection of artworks from the past that contain elements of social engagement or public participation.
As the Covid-19 winter lockdown of 2021 eased, Lloyd and Beinart organised a series of visits to meet with nine artists and project participants to return to the site of a participatory artwork on which they had previously worked together. These encounters reflected on the experience of thinking about an artwork from the past, to consider its ongoing effect in the present, and how the feeling of these projects might be transferred in bodily, emotive, site-specific and non-verbal ways. Such sites visited included a bridge over the Avon River, community centres in Brighton, the site of an old coking mine near Sheffield, and a manmade forest near the Scottish border.
Key to Acts of Transfer was an interest in the complicated processes and relationships that are inherent in practices that rely on participation, and finding ways to communicate the feeling of being a part of such projects. The communication of this feeling is where the transfer of Lloyd’s and Beinart’s title comes in. By setting out to return either physically to the location of a previous artwork or to the metaphorical site of an artwork through conversation and memory, they sought to join the artist and participant in reimagining and partially reliving the work. Interestingly, despite their seeking out physical proximity and understanding, the artworks to which artists participating in the project returned remained like absent spectres in their own work.
The outcomes of the project include a series of short films, an audio work, photographs, drawings, performances, and texts, all of which embrace the imperfections of translating, not documenting, the original experience.
