‘Listening to Strangers’ is a performance devised and performed by Sarah Tripp. This performance was commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow) for their performance strand ‘Eavesdropper’ and supported by Outset Scotland.

‘Listening to Strangers’ presents a series of artworks made by borrowing strangers’ workspaces, tools and materials. By inhabiting a stranger’s workplace the practice of the absent maker becomes embodied in an artwork made with whatever is to hand.

This spoken word and moving image performance brought together three shorter pieces: ‘7 Strangers’, ‘5 Studies of Practice’ and ‘Practicing’. Observations of strangers were combined with studies of ‘magpie’ practice (using a stranger’s practice as the nest in which to raise artworks) to evoke a creative process which is concerned with relational challenges rather than the pursuit of originality.

‘Listening to Strangers’ was subsequently performed for the Sandberg Institute at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam on 16 February 2016.

• Author