At which point can an action be characterized as performance?

Is the key on the enactment itself, or on the agent realizing it?

Can any quotidian action be enacted as performance?

16frames stemmed from the desire to transform daily actions into performance. Over the course of 16 weeks, I committed to performing actions seen as mundane, using a street photobooth as the performative space, which also doubled as the performance registration: each performance would be recorded in 16 images.

This exercise, of enacting each action, has raised my awareness and sensitivity about the acts themselves, posing reflections about how and why we do things in a certain way, and how this can be reimagined in the format of a performance.

Just as ordinary as the actions performed throughout the series are the photobooths. Their choice as performative space is quintessential to my desire to seek the borders with the mundane, material space. The resulting record enabled by this choice came to give the project its title: 16frames.

Over the course of the project, actions went from the quotidian to the absurd, influenced by events or impulses that drove the process into new paths. While some maintained the original premise, other actions approached the form of a political manifesto or even more traditional performance art. These deviations are just as crucial as the original impulse, adding to the process of canvassing the limits between action and performance.

Each action was enacted just once, and the resulting records were unedited and posted to Instagram and Facebook. The recording process creates an extra layer of intertextuality, between photography and performance; a still frame of the performative act, which documents but also interferes, and is, therefore, integral to the work.