麻豆传媒

Five short films by Marcus Coates

At venues in London from 4 September to 30 October

IN A flat in a social housing block in London鈥檚 Pimlico, artist Marcus Coates is being variously nudged, bullied and shocked out of his sense of what is real.

Controlling the process is Lucy Dempster, a teenager in recovery from psychosis. In his ear, Coates hears Dempster prompt him in how to behave, when to sit, what to touch and what to think about. Sometimes, Coates asks for guidance, but more often Dempster鈥檚 reply is drowned out by a second voice, chilling, over-loud, warning him not to ask so many questions.

A cardboard cut-out appears by his bed: a clown girl with bleeding feet. It is a life-size blow-up of a sketch Coates was told to draw a moment before. He hears a balloon burst, shockingly loud, nearly knocking him over.

Commissioned by Artangel, The Directors is a series of five short films, each directed by someone in recovery from psychosis. In each, the director guides Coates as he recreates, as best he can, aspects of their experience. These aren鈥檛 rehearsed performances: Coates receives instructions in real time through an ear-piece. (That this evokes the auditory hallucinations often experienced with psychosis is a coincidence lost on no one.)

So: some questions. In the course of each disorientating, sometimes very frightening film, does Coates ever experience psychosis? And does that matter?

Coates鈥檚 work champions the imperfect, necessary business of imagining our way into other heads, human and non-human. 2007鈥檚 revealed common ground between human and bird vocalisation. He slowed recordings of birdsong down 20-fold, had people learn the slowed-down songs, filmed them, then sped the films up again. The result is a charming, startling glimpse of what humans might sound like if brought up to 鈥渂ird speed鈥�.

In 2010鈥檚 The Trip, as part of a collaboration between the Serpentine Gallery and St. John鈥檚 Hospice in London, Coates enacted the unfulfilled dream of an anthropologist called Alex H. Journeying to the Amazon, he followed precise instructions so that the dying man could conduct, by a sort of remote control, his unrealised last field trip.

The Directors is a work in that spirit. Inspired by a 2017 residency at the psychosis unit of Maudsley Hospital in London, Coates鈥檚 effort to embody and express the breadth and complexity of psychosis is, in part, a learning experience. The project鈥檚 extensive advisory group includes Isabel Valli, a neuroscientist at King鈥檚 College London with a particular expertise in psychosis.

In the end, though, Coates is thrown back on his own resources, having to imagine his way into a condition that, in Dempster鈥檚 experience, robbed her of any certainty in the perceived world, leaving her emotions free to spiral into mistrust, fear and horror.

Dempster鈥檚 film is being screened in the bedroom where her film was shot. The other films are screened in nearby locations, including one in the Churchill Gardens estate鈥檚 30-seater cinema. Arguably the most claustrophobic and frightening of the lot, this film finds Coates drenched in ice water and toasted by electric bar heaters in an attempt to simulate the tactile hallucinations that psychosis can trigger.

Asked by the producers whether he found the exercise in any way exploitative, its director, Marcus Gordon, said: 鈥淲ell, there鈥檚 no doubt I鈥檝e exploited the artist.鈥�