At a given time a line of sight is quietly drawn through the city. Strangers are connected together for a brief moment of silent solidarity, a message that is intimately passed from eye to eye.
Variation 1: Participants align their watches and, at an agreed point in time, stand on their balcony and focus on another participant’s balcony that can be seen in the distance. A line of sight hovering above the ground, darting from balcony to balcony. This focus is held for approximately 5 minutes.
Variation 2: Couples lean out of their window and focus their gaze in opposite directions towards other participating couples at their respective windows. A continuous line of sight, with an in and out point at each juncture, that both separates and joins together each couple.
Variation 3: At street level, the line of sight is drawn from corner to corner, bouncing and rebounding through the city.
Line of sight was first enacted in March 2008 as part of Paradise Stories, an exhibition commissioned by the Liverpool Capital of Culture.
We would like to take this project as a starting point for developing further ‘moments of solidarity’, communal acts that link individuals together, cutting through existing boundaries and notions of community and privacy. These brief acts stretch our focus to a point usually outside the perimeters of our living-environment or personal space, altering the relationship we have to the city and its urban community.
