A Pool Painted Black

by Peter Cant and Krzysztof Honowski

A one take feature length film improvised live.

In A Pool Painted Black, Peter Cant and Krzysztof Honowski disinter kitsch objects from a heap of earth. Sporting reflective jackets, they meticulously film their work of digging up shiny things, arranging the found items into spontaneous images, relayed live to the audience. The magpie-like behaviour of the performers extends to the quotations they speak, appropriated from texts by artists and authors as well as original conversations on the subject of misunderstanding; all here commandeered in service of their ‘song’.

“All songs are at least implicitly about journeys”, wrote John Berger, “or to put it another way: songs are sung to an absence”. As these two wandering figures dig in the earth, they sing to absences. When Édouard Glissant writes of errantry, the Slavic subject also understands it as error, a wandering without a master. By digging in the earth in Athens, a contemporary place of arrival, we are confronting the misunderstanding perpetuated by those immovable forces that claim there would be only peace if the arrivals ceased.

In Krzysztof Honowski and Peter Cant’s work, very small things take on a disproportionate significance. Live camera contrasts the body at work with the incidental object, while spoken text is distorted into abstraction and queer incantation.

A Pool Painted Black was shown as a work in progress at Athens Museum of Queer Arts on 2nd and 3rd June, then performed in full at Atopos, Athens on 5th and 6th June 2017.

c. 90 mins