Performance registered on video – 2018
The average human walking speed is about 5 kilometers per hour. In Westendarp’s one hour video we see the artist in his studio walking 1 full meter in 1 hour marking a black line of the same length on the wall as he walks. Westendarp’s tense body movements reflect this extreme squeezing of about 5 km into 1 meter and project a sense of claustrophobic compression. Our contemporary times require faster and faster speeds and higher and higher productivity. By turning this need for more and faster on its head and doing much less in the same amount of time, Westendarp seeks to create a new ritual whereby the doing of less can challenge our regular notions of distance, time and speed. The artist’s long journey of one meter in one hour is painstakingly performed before us and it can change the state of mind of a person as any other kind of trip does. By compressing distance and tensing time we can explore a way of traveling that opens up new possibilities of experiences in a minimum space.