Someone in a red shirt takes me out into the middle of the Southbank. It is a Saturday in August and one of the hottest days in London this summer. 28 degrees, clear blue skies. She says, I am going to leave you now and when I do I want you to close your eyes and take three deep breaths and when you open them, everything you see will be the performance. She says, okay? I say, yes. She leaves. I close my eyes and take three deep breaths.

There are 122 items in the International Archive of Things Left Unsaid. They sit in a grid, a black background with grey text. The words fade in and out, and my eye strings lines of a strange poem together as it trips across the screen: wish, paranoia; beg, choose, lick.

Rosana Cade’s Walking:Holding is an one to one promenade performance that was presented as part of the River Festival at the National Theatre. Rhiannon Armstrong’s the International Archive of Things Left Unsaid is an online performance commissioned by the Battersea Art Centre and The Space. I experience these works, performances, in the same week. At my desk on Friday, in between work, I quickly look at the International Archive of Things Left Unsaid. On a Saturday in the sun, I walk through the Southbank and Waterloo holding hands with strangers. The similarity in these two works is striking, despite the disparate technologies they use to make their points. The intimacy that is the condition of each work confuses their differences. Their proximity is a reminder that intimacy and care are operating in many places. It is also a reminder that the malleability of performance, its ability to send social interaction in to sudden and alarming relief, is why it is vital. Both works trouble understandings of how and when an intimate encounter can take place in an artistic gesture. The gestures of both are subtle and clear, conditions that repeat. A collection of things that people have never said, a series of strangers who hold my hand as we walk. Both works operate at a contradiction: unsaid things are said, albeit elsewhere; strangers do not feel like strangers when you are touching and talking. They carefully suspend paradox in a particular way.

We talk about holding hands. About casual public intimacy. About it feeling safe or unsafe to hold hands. About the luxury of not thinking that question. We talk about how hot and sticky our hands are, from holding in the August heat. We walk through the park, I am told that I seem tense. My hand seems tense. We change the way we are holding hands but it still seems tense, apprehensive maybe. To the person who holds my hand, not to me.

It is this care that connects these two performances, the care with which both performances take you in. Particularly, it is care in crowded spaces. This care alters what it feels like to be online, on the Southbank. It is an opportunity to pay attention to what occurs in the daily spaces of a life. A question about how we perceive ourselves, perceive ourselves being perceived. Very different spaces – the Southbank, my browser window – but crowded. Crowded with others and with information and with the consequences of their ongoing, ceaseless functions. Crowded to be in. And they are spaces where it is strange to experience care from strangers. Locations fraught with speed of many lives being lived in close parallel. It temporarily reorders how each place is imagined.

Still, the novelty of this care and intimacy is cut through with a kind of darkness. The politics of being visible in relation to someone else comes up early in Walking:Holding, a question about when it may or may not be safe to walk down the street holding a lover’s hand. And although it does not hold the same kind of immediate threat as violence in the street, it is no longer really possible to pretend actions are invisible on the Internet in a country whose intelligence agency operates a ‘full take’ policy on web activity. In this, Walking:Holding and Things Left Unsaid  offer small moments of defiance that are also celebrations.They are density with the intimacy of living. They are exercises in navigating that suggest slightly different ways of thinking about how we move online, in crowded cities.

I slowly investigate the International Archive of Things Left Unsaid. I navigate the archive, zooming in on the individual tiles of the grid: 061 ‘another, idea’; 071 ‘desire, again’; 080 ‘you, pop’; 070 ‘give, insult’ Outside, it is pouring rain and I am cold despite it only being late August. I choose ‘undeclared love’ from a menu that drops down from the top. A dozen or so tiles drift in and out: pretend, chain, here, nothing, everything.

I choose ‘secrets’: think, scared, dancing, you, yes.

I choose ‘pain held in’: drunk, interrupt, pity, mirror, scorn.

I choose ‘all’ and it is like watching a light city up at night.

The person holding my hand tells me the performance is over now. I can walk back along the Thames the National Theatre. I am careful given directions and the care makes it nice to listen to, even though I very much know how to get to the Southbank. I am asked if I want a hug. I say, yes.

You can see Rhiannon Armstrong’s International Archive of Things Left Unsaid online here. Read more about forthcoming performances from Rosana Cade on her website here.  

Jane Frances Dunlop is a Canadian artist and writer based in London. She is currently pursuing a PhD on sites of performance and the Internet at the University of Brighton