Intensification Machine is a performative, experimental installation and series of extemporaneous performances that took place in the Front Gallery of RuptureXIBIT in November 2023.

“Yes, but how to bring text into the work? How to bring the tripping rippling enjambment of poetry into painting, how to allow an installation to speak with a human voice when its voice is more naturally composed of Sense, and language is its other? 

We were building an enclosure, a subterranean space, the ocean floor or deep space and along the way, we found we had built a "black box" theatre. I'm back in school, doing a creative writing MA at Kingston University, working on fragments, and poems, and looking at literature that reveals new forms of writing. 

Suddenly, the ground for the installation I was building became a resonant structure: spontaneous performance began to happen. Sally Minns performed "Holding Space" where she stared out the shopfront window from the black void of the unexpected stage at every passer-by, no facial expression or body movement betraying her reason for being there. 

As the temporalities of my movement-based performances are stretching into the unimaginably slow and long, my text is fragmenting and smashing up against itself. I began to wonder if the writing process could work like painting works: conceived and spoken as it's written. Spontaneous spoken word. No one to play off, no one to save you, just a kernel, a prompt: "chickens in the attic" or "she handled beautifully." 

No thinking beyond that, no planning. At first, I performed to my camera, and then to the empty street, and then to people who would watch from across the street, but who could not hear me. Finally, I performed for Sally, and then for a few brave souls who came to a workshop on instantaneous writing and speaking, where we concluded with a group performance of "Bang bang," a piece I wrote in response to yet another mass shooting in my home country, whom I am estranged from. 

Intensification Machine became a playground for bending and warping text into performance, for generating text from surprising places, and for stretching text into movement and sound. These wild three weeks culminated in Butoh training from Marie Gabrielle-Rotie, who is teaching me now to empty the body and let the body be written by the text. 

Language has once again been consumed by the piece and animates the empty body which trembles at its limit, beyond excess and into surrender.”

- Kate Howe on ‘Intensification Machine’