“In June of 2016, at “No Future,” a self-organized, low-budget, grassroots performance biennial that took place in the squatted space of Green Park, in Athens, Filipino Irish, London based artist Adam Gallagher created In August, a site-specific performance about how forms of political resistance that may seem small and inconsequential come into contact, travel, and expand in unforeseeable ways. Adam’s performance work usually brings together material, textual, and media elements in unexpected ways. He often juxtaposes objects that are not commonly found together to reflect on flows of bodies, affects, and matter that are both part of and stand in friction with global capitalism.

This time, the setting of Adam’s site-specific performance was a significant part of its extraordinary appeal. A former dance hall that lived its times of splendour in the 1960s and 1970s, Green Park is currently a building in ruins that had been closed for over a decade, before a group of Athenian artists, cultural workers, and scholars broke the locks in the summer of 2015. In the following weeks, they cleaned, sanitized, removed garbage, installed an electrical grid powered by generators, and filled the space with plastic chairs and detachable tables. In September of 2015, Green Park was ready to become the burgeoning cultural space that has ever since hosted talks, performances, neighbourhood assemblies, music concerts, social get-togethers over food and drinks, and meetings of the emerging Athenian anti-eviction and anti-foreclosures housing movement. During these gatherings, the main hall still floods with water when rain slips through the cracks of the roof and the now stained and blurry mirror that covers the back wall reflects the sun light that comes into the old dance hall through pieces of broken glass. The electrical power and the water supply have suffered several anonymous sabotages, and the adjacent garden hosts at any time a number of homeless people who camp during the night.

For In August, Adam conceived of a site-specific performance setting four trash bags and half-empty glass bottles of Coca Cola in the Green Park garden, as cardinal points (figure 1). A sunflower sprang out of each bottle, stem dipped in the soda. Adam started the performance with a phone call to a friend who was in real time in the Tate Gallery in London. Without clearly marking the beginning of the performance, the call seamlessly merged with the other activities of people in the garden chatting, sharing drinks, and taking cigarette breaks from the packed schedule of events of the No Future Performance Biennial. After the call, Adam read a text that talked about things that have happened in August, at other times, somewhere else. He enumerated dispersed actions of people in different places, their travel through media, embodiments, gestures, and desires, their accumulation to create social change that is often not registered yet transformative.

Adam’s performance ended with a wishful verse: “We will grow trees from the leftovers”. The golden sunlight of the Athenian summer shined warmly on the Coca Cola glass bottles, as the sunflowers exposed their petals to it. At the end of the performance, Adam left the bottles in the garden for the rest of the day; the flowers kept transforming soda into oxygen. Through photosynthesis, the sunflowers were taking the iconic capitalist beverage and reworking it into energy and matter to be released back into nature. The glass bottles, products meant to be disposed of, became temporary containers for the plants, reusing what is left out of processes of mass production to keep life enduring––for however fleeting a moment. Adam’s reminder of things that happened in different iterations of August signalled the histories of political resistance that sustain current localized yet dispersed political struggles against global capitalism. They were not the only histories, nor even the only ones that happened in August, but the ones that were meaningful for him to share with his audience on the occasion. They were important and generative acts of resistance. In the context of Green Park, In August became a manifesto for reusing what is left behind by economic processes of capitalist accumulation, making it into forms of political resistance, community, and beauty. Like the flowers that could live in a man-made substance strange to them, the allegorical trees that would “grow from the leftovers” signalled the hope for life amongst the ruins of postindustrial debris. However we might imagine life in the shade of neoliberal destruction, Adam’s performance seems to suggest that we will have to make it grow from leftovers, amidst debris and ruins. Improvised, site specific, fleeting, yet transformative moments of meaning could thrive precariously installed amongst the material remains of our historical present.”

Excerpt from Andreea Micu, Performing the Commons: Urban Aesthetics in the Aftermath of the Southern European Economic Crises, 2018.

Performed In August with Javon Bennett via telephone.

Bennett, an HCA at The Royal London Hospital, performed live from the second-floor public telephone in the Tate Modern before his late shift started.

Works installed:

Audience of sunflowers, (Total: Total 2) 2016, - sunflowers sourced locally, glass bottles of coca cola, bin bags waiting to be collected by striking waste collectors, phone, portable speakers, hose with water access.