Ant Hampton / Time Based Editions
(UK / DE / BE / GR)
Borderline Visible
The work is designed to be experienced either collectively or individually: the book is available to buy, take home, explore further, or gift; the audio is included via QR code; and includes versions in French, Italian, Dutch, and Greek.
DESCRIPTION
An audio-guided experience with an artist book, Borderline Visible, begins as a journey from Lausanne, Switzerland, to Izmir, Turkey, in 2022 by two artist friends, one of whom must stop. As the other continues towards Turkey, suddenly alone, the narration grows into a moving and troubled psychogeography as it shifts between “we” and “I,” present and past, piecing together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language. Ant Hampton’s careful, at times miraculous, process of reconnection gradually lights up a constellation: voices and earthquakes, the Sephardic diaspora, tourism and forced movement, breakdowns and dementia, the end of the Ottoman Empire, swifts and swallows, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and an urgent insight into hidden atrocities at the edge of Europe being funded from its center.
Based on a project conceived with Rita Pauls
Published in 2023 by Time Based Editions: a series of books binding print to time, merging sound with paper
Voice and Sound (English Version): Ant Hampton
Book Design: Roland Brauchli
Directed: David Bergé and Ant Hampton
Music:
- “Fever, A Warm Poison” by Oren Ambarchi. From the album In The Pendulum's Embrace (2007)
- “Corridor Between Days” by Perila (2022)
- “Quixotism Parts 1 and 2”, by Oren Ambarchi. From the album Quixotism (2014)
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ant made his first works under the name Rotozaza—a performance-based project that began in 1998 and spanned theater, installation, intervention, and writing-based works. His work, though varied in tone and content, has consistently played with a tension between liveness and automation. Most often, Ant’s practice has involved guiding people through unrehearsed performance situations, and since 2007, it has included the audience itself within structures loosely defined as Autoteatro. Rotozaza became a partnership with Silvia Mercuriali and ended in 2009 after their last production, Etiquette, which was also the first Autoteatro work. Since then, Ant has worked with Tim Etchells, Christophe Meierhans, Britt Hatzius, Gert-Jan Stam, Glen Neath, Joji Koyama, and Sam Britton to create the works listed here, which continue to tour internationally; over 80 language versions of the various Autoteatro productions created so far exist.
At times, Ant’s performances do not require travel; a paradoxical outcome (especially for an artist committed to liveness and presence), which in turn informed his recent advocacy and research project, ShowingWithoutGoing.live.
In September 2023, he founded Time Based Editions with David Bergé, an ongoing series of “live books” binding print to time, merging sound with paper. The first edition was his own Borderline Visible, which won the 2024 IDFA DocLab Special Jury Award for Creative Technology. For the second edition, ADE DEA: A Cover Version, he collaborated with musicians Ulla and Perila.
Ant's experiments and research into making performance interventions in areas of tourism or holidaymaking (DETOURISTIKI, Palermo / Athens 2024-25) led to phased / romantic, an ongoing series of work with Alice De Crais exploring inactivity and contemplation in relation to expectations around contemporary labor. From these performances, the sensual yet Bartleby-like character Uscita has emerged. She appears again in his new work for Time Based Editions, All the Downtime (2026) - a dream-documentary délire of warehouses, logistics, data centers, and sabotage.
Other solo projects include experimentation around “live portraiture” as The Other People: structured encounters with people from a non-theatrical milieu. He was head dramaturg for Projected Scenarios at Manifesta 7, the European Biennial for Contemporary Art, and has contributed to projects by other artists, including Ivana Müller, David Weber-Krebs, Anna Rispoli, Jerome Bel, and Forced Entertainment.
Ant has created and led workshops worldwide, including FANTASY INTERVENTIONS: Writing for Site-Specific Performance and has also worked as a coach/mentor for artist programs such as MAKE (Ireland); a.pass and Sound Image Culture (Belgium); Onassis AiR (Greece); and DasArts (Netherlands) where, together with Edit Kaldor in 2013, he designed and mentored a 10-week block, Every Nerve. The work with Kaldor spawned his own wider investigation of radical trust, risk-taking, and leaps of faith, most obviously via The Thing: An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, created with Christophe Meierhans.
http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/autoteatro.html
https://www.anthampton.com/menu.html
ADDITIONAL THANKS
Pieter Ampe, Giorgos Antoniou, Sae Bosco and Samos Volunteers, Yannick Christian, Hani Dunia, Effi & Amir, Tim Etchells, Katy Fallon, Martin Hampton, Britt Hatzius, Leo Kay, LAPS, Camille Louis, Eva Neklyaeva, Beyhan Onur, Anelka Tavares, Prodromos Tsinikoris, Giulia de Vecchi, Anny Y
SUPPORT
Created with the support of The Resonance Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Bimeras, Istanbul, TR / Berlin, DE; and Théâtre Vidy, Lausanne, CH.Research and prototype support from Lita House of Production and Kundura Stage, Istanbul, TR; and National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessaloniki, GR.