Liveness at a Distance: Concept Touring and Borderline Visible

This research event will focus on Ant Hampton’s recent work Borderline Visible, currently available to experience within the Open City Documentary Festival's ‘Expanded Realities’ exhibition at Rich Mix.

Borderline Visible, the first edition of the Time Based Editions series, is described as "a series of books binding print to time, merging sound with paper." The piece combines narration, soundscape, and participation with the turning of pages, creating a unique performative experience. Borderline Visible tracks a journey from Lausanne to Izmir, blending psychogeographical exploration with reflections on language, memory, and displacement.

Ant will also discuss SHOWING WITHOUT GOING, a research project he initiated in 2021 to explore how live performance can be experienced and shared without the artists being physically present. This initiative delves into the concept of "Concept Touring," where performance transcends physical borders, addressing challenges such as travel restrictions, financial constraints, and environmental sustainability. The project culminated in an online ‘Atlas,’ offering an overview of current practices in the field of concept touring, alongside a range of related theoretical concerns.

The conversation will be led by Nohar Lazarovitz-Balaam, lecturer on the MA/MFA Advanced Theatre Practice Course, and will be followed by a Q&A.

This event will provide a deep dive into these projects and the broader implications of concept touring, exploring how artists can rethink touring models to foster sustainable, cross-cultural collaboration in today’s rapidly changing global landscape.

We encourage everyone to engage with Borderline Visible prior to the event. You can access it for free at the Open City Festival: https://opencitylondon.com/2025-festival/programme/expanded-realities/

There are also a limited number of copies of Borderline Visible available for Central students and faculty. If you’d like to experience it, please contact Nohar.Lazarovitz-Balaam@cssd.ac.uk

About Ant Hampton
Ant Hampton (1975, CH) is a British-German performance maker and writer. His work since 1999 has often involved guiding people through unrehearsed situations and interactive relations, using automated devices. His three collaborations with Tim Etchells are participative experiences for two at a time, combining audio with different engagements with the page: text and silent reading (The Quiet Volume, 2010); archive photography (Lest We See, 2015); and mark-making/ erasure (Not to Scale, 2020). In more recent years his practice has expanded into a wider investigation of risk-taking and leaps of faith, for example with The Thing – An Automatic Workshop in Everyday Disruption, created with Christophe Meierhans. These and many other of his “Autoteatro” works continue to tour internationally in over 80 language versions, some of them without anyone needing to travel – an oxymoronic outcome for an art committed to liveness and presence which in turn informed his 2021 advocacy and research project: ShowingWithoutGoing.live – an Atlas. Together with David Bergé, he co-founded Time Based Editions in 2023. anthampton.com

Hashtags: #ConceptTouringCSSD

Event Keywords: Concept Touring, Sustainability, Performance Beyond Borders, Showing Without Going

This event is sponsored by the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity (PTEQ).
Image credit : Bernard Kalu / DocLab