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I liked the idea of trying to take over this semi-public space, and to use the garage architecture to create an image, to appropriate the petrol station as a glorious illuminated arena, that was my way of trying to subvert their presence in the world.

The idea was of gate-crashing a garage. There were lots of people around at the museum and we all got second-hand fancy dress clothes, really wild dresses and dressed up and went to the garage. There was a drummer and we had quite a lot of vodka and danced around and took over the space for a while. I really liked the idea of the audience being people who had stopped to get petrol, a really banal and unromantic audience. The people working there were just watching out of the window. The police did turn up and I don’t really know what happened, someone else talked to them. We tried to make a film that didn’t really come out, though there is a good black and white photo of the project. We were trying to use the technology available to us in Poland then where we were ‘camping’ in The Artist’s Museum , in Lodz. Around that time Esso petrol did an advert of cheerleaders dancing in a petrol station at night and I got paranoid that they had seen something…maybe they had appropriated my idea. What I had done was all quite obscure, in small places, but you never know.

Date

1996

Venue and location

The Artists’ Museum Lodz, Poland
Statoil Garage, Lodz

Media

Performance
Photographs
Video