Jacqui Shelton

Jacqui Shelton -- “Crush”
Video + performance
text/writing: https://island-is.land/texts/crush

This work follows an interest in how ventriloquism operates socially—in that a voice, emotion, or action is projected through a crowd of people as the ventriloquial ‘host’. More specifically, I am looking at crowd behaviour where there is a singular focal point of the crowds focus or desire (the pop star, rock band, sport team, deity) and how the crowd operates as a singular body, reducing the individuals agency to speak, move, and at times breathe. The work looks at instances of ‘crowd crush’ in which the sheer amount of people moving through a space produces a fluid-like aspect to the crowd of bodies, resulting in dangerous situations which can cause people to be crushed/asphyxiated. This, I relate to the condition of crushing, or having a crush, reflecting how one projects desire onto a distant body (often unobtainable, unknown) not unlike the crowd’s projection of admiration/desire onto the popstar etc. The condition of having a crush is similar in its corporeal and spatial sensations to the disasters that result in ‘crowd crush’: shortness of breath, sweating, feeling un-moored, scattered, beside oneself, not in control of oneself. Essentially social ventriloquism is the condition of crushing/having a crush as performed by the multiplicity/a crowd of people.

Documentation