Clara García Fraile’s collaboration with Sam Pearson formed part of ONE YEAR ON – a strand of the Festival with work by artists who had been part of the Elevator programme at the 2009 Festival. The strand offered continuing support to artists in their early career, while audiences had the opportunity to track this development in the artists’ early work over the year.

From the original Festival website:

“I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you”.
Bob Dylan, Positively 4th Street

The lights go off. The film starts and there you are, standing in the middle of it, a character suspended in the limbo of its creation, malleable, helpless under the will of your makers, trapped in a not-yet-written plot. This durational ‘wearable’ film invites you to inhabit an unfamiliar body and move within it.  Meanwhile, you hear your authors designing your fate, your secrets, your costume, your weather, deciding over your favourite song and other aspects of their work – ever felt like that before?

The People Machine reflects on the role of the film-viewer as the ultimate object of the filmmaker’s creation and on the function (and defunction) of the body of flesh in our media-inundated age of audiovisual reproduction.  You, the viewer, stand in the space between a fiction under construction and a doubtful reality that seemingly unfolds around you. It is up to you to play a game of mental transport and create a new reality between the virtual and the physical, the film and the dark room, the character’s story and your own.

Clara García Fraile’s work uses film, performance, dance and text to set up unconventional and often surreal situations in which you are invited to participate and play.

Sam Pearson uses audiovisual media to unlock hidden sounds existing in everyday materials and spaces, which he manipulates to create immersive kinetic sculpture, performance and installation.

The two met while studying Performance and Visual Art at the University of Brighton and have since worked together in the production of a diversity of projects (such as The Impossibility of Being an Apple and Treat Me Like You Do, exhibited at NRLA 09). This is their first entirely collaborative work under the umbrella of Parachutes and Puzzles.

Funded by Arts Council England and the National Lottery.  Supported by Blast Theory, The Basement and Lighthouse.

Update 2020: The artists changed the performance they brought to Glasgow. The title of the work actually presented was When We Meet Again. The text for which you can read on their website: meandthemachine.co.uk/works/whenwemeetagain/

Their multidisciplinary collaborative works obtained The Arches Brick Award 2010, a nomination for the Total Theatre Awards, the Young Artists Awards 2009 and 2010 (Premios de Arte Joven de la JCyL, Spain). When We Meet Again was  part of the British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2011 and of the UK representation in the Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean 2011. Their works were also shown at Forest Fringe (Edinburgh), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), SPILL (London), British Dance Editions, De Balie (Amsterdam), Temps d’Image (Dusseldorf), Battersea Arts Center, Future Everything (Manchester), Finland, Cairo, Macao, Budapest, a nuclear bunker in Krakow…

Currently Sam works in documentary filmmaking and Clara participates in the Independent Studies Programme of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona.