HEAP OF BRICKS

TNWK performed ‘A Heap of Bricks’ on Sunday 24 April, 2005 outside the Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay. It was the final day of this year’s Cardiff Bay Literature Festival, hosted and curated by Academi. The performance involved writing on and then building a temporary pyramid of three hundred common bricks.

Each brick had a pair of words on it, one English and one Welsh. Each word was drawn from the phrase ‘we came home only to find there was no home when you see an entire city city in ruins what can you say to the fact that your own little house is no more’. Hundreds of people, out on a beautiful spring day, saw the phrase built and many engaged the artists in discussion about its meanings. One or two even took a brick home with them.

This was the first substantial bi-lingual work by TNWK. The original phrase, from which a translation was made by the bookshop manager of the Centre and subtly amended by passers-by was, word by word, a good fit for the common brick. However, some Welsh words were much less accommodating and less easily accommodated. Differences between southern and northern Welsh became the subject of conversation. So, language itself became more fore-grounded as a sense of home, as much as recent human and natural disasters in Fallujah and the south-east Asian Tsunami.

The 28 artists taking part were each given £50 to spend at Homebase and 2 hours to make a work for the confines of a car park space. The Enduring Freedoms purchased one hundred house bricks and with a conscious nod to Carl André and Robert Smithson created a version of the following text:

“When you see an entire city city in ruins what can you say to the fact that your own little house is no more”