about the project.
9-5 traverses themes of corporate labor, silence, and empathy. Eleven performers dressed in white arrived by public transportation each day, silently moving to their positions at the glass wall on the Pavilion’s east side. Sitting formally between the glass partitions of the window, which mirror the quintessential office workspace, each performer wrote silently all day about the people they see, creating a literature of pedestrian life in the city. Pujol intended to evoke the repetitiousness of all labor through this silent meditative gesture, while seeking to foster a deeper “seeing” of the human condition. The transparency of the Pavilion’s glass “cubicles” allows for our open vision, for a more direct relationship with the environment and the flow of humanity.
Read selections of the writings here.
9-5 featured performers Dillon de Give, Kate Harding, Young Sun Han, Sara Jimenez, Bess Matassa, Micaela Martegani, Ernesto Pujol, James Rich, Valarie Samulski, Caitlin Turski, Michael Watson, Joy Whalen, and Jayoung Yoon.
media.
about the artist.
Ernesto Pujol is a site-specific performance artist and public choreographer with a socially-engaged art practice. Pujol creates silent, durational, walking performances as collective portraiture within mythical landscapes and historic architecture, aiming to reveal their psychic underlay in the Jungian sense. Pujol is a student of the human condition, inhabiting dreams, secrets and visions as intangible but vital fragments to understanding and healing history. He is interested in contributing to greater collective consciousness through mindful presence, achieved through deep sight, profound inner silence, and considered gestures. His durational performances have often served as ephemeral mausoleums or monuments to forgotten, or remembered but unresolved social issues that have been mourned or reflected upon during the experiences. Pujol is the author of Sited Body, Public Visions: silence, stillness & walking as Performance Practice; as well being a contributor to publications such as Awake: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art. http://www.ernestopujol.org/