Fault Lines

Collaboration with Jemila MacEwan
Format: Sculpture based performance
Sculpture element: 52 oversized playing cards cut from sheetrock
Venue: BRIC Arts Media
Year: 2018

Fault Lines is a collaborative sculpture based performance by Jemila MacEwan and Nooshin Rostami. Without verbal communication, the two artists construct a giant house of cards, inviting audience members to assist at various stages of the build.

In the performance's second half, the artists withdraw load bearing cards one at a time until the structure gives way and collapses. The work takes its title from the geological fault line, the meeting point between two tectonic plates that creates instability and risk of collapse, re-contextualized here as the point of conflict between national and political borders on a global scale. As immigrant artists, MacEwan and Rostami draw on the complexity of their own geographical histories and the politics of their own displacement.

Using a simple, familiar game of balance, Fault Lines explores the fragility of community as a structure under pressure, reimagining construction as an emotionally laborious, collaborative process of constantly anticipating and mitigating failure.

Construction

Documentation of the collaborative build, as audience members join the artists in assembling the card structure.

Deconstruction

The structure's collapse, as load bearing cards are withdrawn until the construction gives way.