De-learning to play the piano, performance commissioned by Work&Leisure International, 1999
4 months performance with 140 hours of video documentation, final concert at The international4, Manchester
shown as an installation in the group show "Ne travaillez jamais" Munich 2000

The piece is a response to the book "The Sight of Sound, Music, representation, and the history of the body" by Richard Leppert (image 1) showing how music being linked to the body, is painted according to the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality...
Instead of re-presenting a critique of how women are presented, the artist sits at the piano and in front of the camera. The traditional and bourgeois way of teaching young girls to play (only what has been written by masters) in order to play at home for oneself or for the family, is shifted in several ways.

the 140 hours of practice are recorded ans kept as a musical element in its own right. The notions of mistake, wrong notes, are not relevant anymore...

read article by Josephine Pryde in Work & Leisure catalogue (1999) ---------- read article by Gavin Wade in FLUX