AVALANCHE The home site 2025
AVALANCHE The home site (2025) is an international collaboration with artist Lotte Van Gelder (NL). Above you can watch edited documentation of the performance. Working with sites separately over a number of years, and together (see Destination Unknown 2023), this collaboration is the natural evolution of our work together investigating site situated socially engaged performance. We curated site this evening length performance starting with convivial gathering and hospitality, and then dance and choreography, original text and sound, and collective participatory spatial interventions in and around the iconic Brutalist social housing estate in Thamesmead where I’ve been a Live/Work artist since 2024.
Sensitive to the ecologies and post-industrial landscape of the river Thames, the ancient monastic Lesnes Abbey Woods and ruins, and the heavy massive geometric forms, exposed Minimalist concrete and functional, repetitious, iconic Brutalist architecture of the soon-to-be-demolished urban decay unique to this site: relations between home, land, water, ruins old and new, each other – and our many selves – dance.
Above you can see our invitation sent out to invited guests. Our evening length event was developed through an intense period of research and development in around the local area nestled between the River Thames and the Abbey Woods and ruins. We worked on site developing dance. We made original text writing with and through the site that we developed into original sound. We created various spatial interventions with our bodies and architecture from which we developed gentle offerings of inclusion and participation for our guests. We choreographed all these elements in a promenade performance that began inside and moved outside into and around the estate before returning home for more conviviality and hospitality. Guests in attendance formed part of what we as collaborators refer to as ‘a fluid ensemble’. Below you can see our print editions created at the University of East London print workshops developed from our photographic studies of the site and our performance portraiture.
Adam Moore and Lotte Van Gelder, AVALANCHE The home site (2025), digital collage on acetate, 59.4cm x 84.1cm
Below you can read extracts of our original writing and audio featured in the edited performance documentation at the top of the page. Text is interspersed with stills from our performance performance documentation and individual digital collages from our print edition. Each of our texts has a different font.
get behind that wheel, Lorraine
get behind that wheel
a poetic dog – is still a dog
there’s no metaphor here
art, life, friend, living, art, friend, life, living, home
soglia
atabe
umbral
drempel
schwelle
If I define a work and sum it up within the boundary of a definition, given my intentions, that seems to be a limitation on me and an imposition on other people of how to think about the work – it has absolutely nothing to do with my activity or art. I think the significance of the work is in its effort and not its intentions. And that effort is a state of mind, an activity, an intention in the world.
This is a map that will take you somewhere, but when you get there you won’t really know where you are. You’re always caught between two worlds, one that is and one that isn’t.
soglia
atabe
umbral
drempel
schwelle
I’m more interested in all aspects of time. And also in the experience you get at the site, when you’re confronted by the physicality of actual duration. To me the permanent aspects of the physical are not what’s interesting, only what I can remember is. And I like to embody memories in my work.
a poetic dog – is still a dog
there’s no metaphor here
the diamonds on the pavement your eyes will reach
the fading blue of garage doors and songs of playing children
as we ride apollo gradients and punk bikes
past the broken glass and Timmy’s obstruction to pick up our flowers
sensing constant collapse
i feel the destruction of this world
in the humming of the laundry of the neighbour and the droning of cars across the street changes its tone
ensueños
It’s already destroyed. It’s a slow process of destruction. The world is slowly destroying itself. The catastrophe comes suddenly, but slowly.
I like the idea of quiet catastrophes taking place…
It seems to me that one of the principal functions of artistic involvement is to stretch the limits of what can be done and to show others that art isn’t just making objects to put in galleries, but that there can be an artistic relationship with things outside the gallery that is valuable to explore.
I think an artwork is not merely correctly predicting all the relations you can measure. Some people set up a construct and tell people their intentions, and then the construct verifies the intentions. Those kinds of intentions preclude people from experiencing the work.
Occasionally I consider the gallery as though it were some kind of hunting ground. But what I want to emphasise is that if you want to concentrate exclusively on the exterior, that’s fine, but you’re probably always going to come back to the interior in some manner.
there’s no metaphor here
art, life, friend, living, art, friend, life, living, home
