Everybody Has To Be Somewhere is an experiment in happening and forgetting, which explores how we are trapped and isolated by time in our daily lives. It is an intergenerational collaboration between a young Chinese artist and a veteran from the UK.

The performance combines live and delayed video to explore the ways our perceptions are sliced and reshaped by the relentless passage of time. From simple rules the performances create unpredictable complexity; as present and past actions merge together, the performance is created as it unfolds. Each performance is unique and unrepeatable.

Memory is summoned actively, as the present is retained as an image of the past.  The piece uses the active creation of memory – the audience’s and the performers’ - to construct our reality, ephemerality returning as history.

This piece blurs the distinction between memory and reality, and gives space for anxiety, humour and pleasure to be had in unpicking the cognitive threads of continuity, stability and common sense we all rely on.

The project evokes the experience of time directly, in a way live video and pre-recorded video cannot.  The past is imposed upon the present as a linear thread from start to finish, underlining time’s duration  as both past and present so it is perceived doubly, and so outside the usual continuity or our experience of the everyday.

There is no language, and the performance addresses the cultural and intergenerational divides with direct physical and visual means accessible to everyone.