Story Café, live art and video project, 2004–
Biennale of Young Artists, Rüütelkonnahoone, Tallinn, Estonia, 2007
“Tell a story – get a coffee.”
I have set up my Story Café in nine cities to date: London, Limerick, Helsinki, Tallinn, Moscow, Kuopio, Brussels, Fribourg and Turku. In my café, the visitor gets a free coffee in exchange for a story. The stories are recorded on video. The visitors can also watch videos of earlier stories that are shown in the café. Some of the stories are dramatised into short films.
Reality TV is today an everyday phenomenon, and it has changed people’s attitudes towards performing publicly. Performances acted out in front of a camera are no longer the privilege of a small minority. The seemingly undirected recording of stories on video is a method that has been used quite frequently in personal documentary films in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as in videos borrowing the narrative devices of the tradition of documentary films.
When I first began recording stories, I assumed that the narrators would be truthful and that their stories would be recorded on the videotape just as they were narrated. Soon, however, I began asking myself to what extent were they, in fact, performances? How do the narrators construct their identities in front of the camera? How do the earlier recorded stories affect the performances of the new storytellers? An artist who utilises the performances and stories of other people must face certain ethical questions. Can we speak of a reciprocal relationship? Where does one draw the line of exploitation?
