The launch of performance and poetry evening Rushtakes place at London’s Auto Italia on December 8.
Led by Christopher Kirubi in collaboration with Adam Fa-Rah, Chloe Fiilani, Shenece Oretha and Rhoda Boateng, the group are meeting collectively to put on evenings of poetry, sound and performance where they will “seek to trace often hidden spaces of intimacy and carve out new ones – both private and shared.”
Opening up the conversation, they will explore these intimate conversations through text, sound and movement, and the project will continue with a publication in 2018. London-based artist Kirubi “uses the mutability of images, objects and text to negotiate the limits of sexuality, gender, race and desire.”
After my conversation with artist, DJ and musicianTerre Thaemlitz took place, we returned to Auto Italia, where Thaemlitz has a solo exhibition which is running October 3 to December 3. I had insisted upon conducting this interview in person as a nod to Interstices, the title of the show and a word meaning the space between things. I’ve always been obsessed with how conversation teeters and returns, the way that people pause in conversation to allow for intervention to happen, for others to interrupt or clarify. Context and nuance are everything in the unspooling of a thought over time. And how the removal of certain acts of conversational gap-filling leaves one with unease; how much the work of softening the interstices in communication is gendered, how much is culturally expected.
Terre Thaemlitz Interstices (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Auto Italia, London.
The way that music can have ambient or jarring qualities is the same way that visual information can be received. One can be lulled into the experience of ‘looking at art,’ ‘watching porn,’ or ‘listening to music’ without realising that something is off until already wading in uncertain waters. Being walked, a little way, into taking in information that feels threatening to you. Thaemlitz’s in-person affect was hard to explain to those who, like me, had been intrigued by her performance at Cafe Oto the previous night. A lack of excess, sense of vigilance to the demands of the moment, and a refusal to slip into social habit or convention without questioning its foundation may not be an ‘authentic’ self, but they chime with the political concerns of his work.
I was curious about how it functions to be onstage looking back at an audience watching your work, with all their reactions writ large. Particularly with ‘Deproduction’, a fairly intense experience of art-viewing even if you begin in agreement with the central tenet of the work: that democracy cannot exist while the family exists. Thaemlitz explains that it’s also her reaction to the conventional male-to-female drag show, replete with extravagance and loud performativity. Another factor was the audio, often made well in advance of their accompanying video works, which use techniques as a response to ‘things that were going on with real-time signal processing that were steering digital synthesis towards the kind of live stage paradigm.’ Despite being uninterested in performing, both in their work as a DJ and musician as well as in the constantly multiplying public panels, Q&A sessions, talks, interviews, and lectures that accompany being a cultural worker, Thaemlitz participates in these performative structures only to the extent that is required for the maintenance of life, while continuing to critique and make public that reluctance.
As I was transcribing our conversation, I came across a line by deadpan Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy, “Families are so strong. They have all of advertising on their side. But a person alone is nothing but a shipwreck. First they cast it adrift, then they let it sink.” Thaemlitz’s body of work suggests that sinking should only be considered one option of many.
Terre Thaemlitz Interstices (2017) Detail. Courtesy the artist + Auto Italia, London.
** Last night I saw ‘Deproduction’ and you’ll be showing works again at Cafe Oto tonight as well. In terms of the screening format, where people are either watching a twenty-minute video in a gallery, or watching you onstage next to it, is there a difference in the reception? The scrolling text is difficult to follow because of the speed, which creates a sense of urgency.
T: Well, when I make the pieces – including ‘Interstices,’ ‘Lovebomb,’ ‘Soulnessless’, and ‘Deproduction’ – they are intended to function in two distinct ways. The main way is as something that you would purchase and watch at home. My approach towards video work, and writing as well, is about anticipating it as something that is intended to be revisited. Of course, in a live performance setting, that revisiting is not allowed. It’s a one pass deal. Still, the themes that are being discussed are bigger than a sixty minute time slot.
The pressure you were talking about – feeling incompleteness or that you’ve missed things – is an admission that the conversation is ongoing, or that it hasn’t even begun. At the same time, it’s also trying to get away from the standard musical performance scenario of delivering feelings of fulfilment and communion – the audience having communion with each other, and communion with the musicians onstage, blah blah. My performances are a critical rejection of that, so instead of people feeling connected together, I set them up so that by the end they are aware they didn’t get it all. Also, what the person next to them got could be totally different from the parts that they caught. That social disjuncture, for me, is more realistic and honest than the kind of fake communion that people would normally have at a concert, where they leave agreeing.
** ‘I got everything! We all got it, we were there together!’
T: (laughs) That’s a kind of bullshit thing. So then to start from that more realistic and honest moment of disconnection, the question becomes: is it actually possible to have a kind of social dialogue or conversation that we all hypothesise has happened at the end of a happy rock concert or something? So that’s why I follow performances with Q&A, begging the question of dialogue, as a performance of the fallacy of what music performance usually is.
** It feels like a trojan horse, in a way, to sit people down thinking ‘we’re here to be entertained by this music personality,’ and have them then stuck in a position of being forced to sit with the ideas that you put forth…
Terre Thaemlitz Interstices (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Auto Italia, London.
T: Yes, and denying performativity. I definitely see it as tape-based work. You hit the play button. It’s part of that legacy of musique concrete, tape-based audio. On the one hand, that’s a broader rejection of the conventional stage paradigm, and on the other hand, as a trans person it’s an attempt to re-think the transgendered stage. As a trans person the idea of sitting still for an hour or two onstage before people is my rejection of the typical transgendered stage.
** How does the onslaught of text-based information you present undo the resistant mechanism that an audience may have? If you’re reading something at your own speed you can critique it in the moment, question certain ideas being put forth – but in this captive audience scenario that you’ve provoked you’ve undone some of that resistance, or some of that capacity for critique, in the urgency of following words down a screen moving away from you.
T: Yeah, and if you do pause to reflect, you’ll miss the next thing. But for the premiere of ‘Deproduction’ in Greece and Germany we distributed printed versions in translation.
** Translation is never direct, is it, it’s totally mediated. It’s even more difficult to translate work that has a particular tone, maybe irony or humour.
T: Or that has ideas that people are generally not exposed to.
** I wanted to then talk a bit more about that idea of translation, thinking about why all the visual source material you use in ‘Deproduction’is Japanese porn, specifically incest porn and gay porn. Do you take the local context into account when you’re asked to be present in another place?
T: I know that while I’m producing the works in Japan, I’m also going to be presenting them in Europe, to a primarily white audience, and a hefty chunk of them are usually going to be straight people. Open-minded, maybe, but I did have this feeling last night – there were definitely a lot of straight couples, on dates…
Terre Thaemlitz Interstices (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Auto Italia, London.
** It’s so funny that that’s the date they were on, the total destruction of the family and heteronormativity and reproduction. I hope they went home and looked at each other like, fuck…
T: I like to imagine them going home and fucking with all that shit in their head!
** (laughs)
T: …I approach the representation of issues of race as something that, like gender and sexuality, is always going to be problematic given the power dynamics of the cultures around us. That also makes the problems contextual. When presenting the project in Japan, the problematics that arise have to do with all of the Japanese incest porn images revolving around a nuclear model of the family that is symptomatic of Western globalization. Then the gay porn, which was of a group of gay Japanese thugs raping a salaryman on the train during his commute, is also about the idea of homosexuality threatening the proper capitalist worker. Both of these strains in Japanese porn, even in Japan, are symptomatic of globalization. So, these dynamics, for me, are really integral to the broader themes of the piece, and then become strategic, as points of critical engagement with those media. But outside Japan, and particularly in Europe, these non-western representations of a western family model get positioned in relation to western assumptions about race, colonialism, orientalism, etc.
** I was thinking about the idea of watching porn collectively in a non-private situation. Something that you mentioned last night was about sex education being a general term for what is needed to take in these understandings of power, hierarchies, bodies, and the movements between those. How porn works as a pedagogical tool for many people, and I would say especially queer people, whose sex practices are not represented – even in a truncated way, the way heterosexual sex is – in mainstream media.
T: Yeah. I would consider last night quite a tame performance, which was reshot and filtered Japanese porn imagery, shown in an environment where people would not feel safe to masturbate even if they wanted to. This was clear. It would be quite a different performance if it was in a space where people felt free to masturbate, or have sexual exchanges. What would it mean to do that amidst this heavy text, or to have the option of ignoring or momentarily stepping out of the text in order to be physical with someone? There is an impossibility of sexual expression within the framework of these ‘artistic’; or ’cultural’ frameworks where these themes are supposedly able to be discussed openly. It becomes a gesture of the pornographic, as opposed to ‘the pornographic,’ and for me, that’s a capitulation. It’s not like i was trying to do something cool by showing some porn to stir stuff up, it’s more the opposite: look how quickly this porn is divested of its erotic power. ‘Interstices’ does that as well. ‘Interstices’ is all drawn from trans porn.
** Yeah, but I would say ‘Deproduction’ is even more removed, more abstracted, so it becomes even less sexualised. What is the process of decision making there, to take another step back from how that could be functioning?
T: The way that it’s been re-shot through a fractured lens so that the images are as if through a kaleidoscope is meant to invoke a kind of sentimentality that is more romantic than sexual, which is about sentimentality around the family. There’s this tripling of images. For me, this is a metaphor for getting away from singularity. Making it soft, playing on sentimentality at the same time the text is critiquing family.
** It also does something to queer the image; instead of having this heterosexual scene, you suddenly have three cocks not connected to any body, and a hole that is not gendered, and you have hands here and there, coming out of unplaceable flesh, this kind of beast.
T: It becomes monstrous. It is a queering of images, but I didn’t want it to be a queering that passed as liberating.
** What was said about body modification? I read it as referring to hormones being self-administered without medical supervision, sometimes due to the difficulty in obtaining them through the long process of the gender clinic, or because of someone’s refusal to pass through those processes, having to lie every step of the way in order to be ‘certified.’
T: Like the Preciado paradigm. So I discuss the emergence of that, how the counterculture of trans self-medicating appears to be a kind of ‘good’ response to the bureaucracy of formal conventional transsexual transitioning therapies, and of course there are approaches towards the plasticity of the body that are not so rooted in essentialisms. But what I talk about in ‘Deproduction’is that you quickly find these gender subcultures and countercultures are also oftentimes tied into seeing it just about body modification on the level of tattoos and piercings. Which, in itself, isn’t the problem, but the problem is that most of these movements are also connected to certain mythologies of the clan or the tribe. It reflects, on the subcultural level, our internalisation of the larger mainstream emphasis on the need to reinscribe the family as the site for social services. I mean, as these mainstream democracies destroy more open, non family-based social services, right?
Terre Thaemlitz Interstices (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Auto Italia, London.
** This rhetoric of queers choosing their own families, because families are so important that they need to be reinscribed, even if their traditional family has disowned them.
T: Yes, so many of our queer subcultures and queer communities are grounded around the very formulas through which we’ve been traumatised. Part of that, of course, is about the fantasy of finding the fulfilment that was denied us by being disowned – not only by family, but also by governments and nations. This is why we have, for example, in the world of house music, ‘House Nation.’ This idea of the nation coming up in the same way that family comes up. Because these are the sites of our abandonment, the sites of trauma. So, for me, I think it’s important to identify how our countercultures remain enslaved to the family, clannism, nationalism, and reflect this internalisation of the larger pro-family bullshit we wish to depart from.
** Something else that you mentioned earlier was this notion of remaining in the minor, of not making work that should be understood by most people. And with that, the refusal of this flattening of complexity. Saying, this is for a specific audience with a specific set of experiences, while also not agreeing that because we’re a queer community we share a certain set of experiences or political beliefs.
T: I very much take into a project’s formulation the idea that people live through closets. So even if an audience appears very straight, that doesn’t mean that the only people who will ‘get it’ will be the more overt fags. There are people in closets and we’re all in and out, dealing with stuff. Something could resonate even more deeply for someone who identifies as straight than for someone who doesn’t. Maybe to put it in easier terms, thinking mathematically, pop culture is addition and subtraction – the idea that one plus one equals two, and reducing everything to that level. But we also know, with mathematics, that there are times when you really must speak through calculus. It’s likely only going to be legible to the people who have studied calculus and have adapted that language. And when I say “studied,” in reference to queer experience that would be more experiential and not academic. Tools for survival. In presenting these projects involving “calculus” to a broader audience that’s not ‘for queers only’ – there’s no door policy on my events – that means they get received differently, and just letting that happen. Letting them be lost for a moment. It’s ok! Letting them also be exposed, so if they feel triggered to focus enough to pick up something new, then that’s a possibility. Part of that process of flattening complexity you talked about is about conforming to mainstream ideas of ‘Pride’ and visibility – the idea that visibility always equals power, and closets, silence, and secrecy always equal shame and death. This formula – this didactic polarity – doesn’t reflect the histories of closets and secrecy as means to self-defence that facilitated our histories and our survival amidst dominant heterosexism.
** And perhaps in some cases even allowed for more ‘freedom’ outside of a policy of assimilation and visibility at all costs?
T: Yes, so I produce for a mixed model of audience that incorporates the reality of those who may be closeted, and others who are not even seeking resolution. But I would say ‘mobility,’ not ‘freedom,’ because freedom is a word that I don’t really like. It’s a bit too Utopian. Some years ago I started being increasingly non-cooperative when it comes to recording and archiving. For example, not letting people film the events, as a reaction against this queer archival moment. Not because I think that this strategy that I have is the ‘right way,’ but, in this current moment where strategies of silence have, in a way, become taboo, what does it mean to allow myself to work through and experience silence and withholding in public? Within a public that is demanding recording? So it’s more about me trying to learn for myself what it means to withhold. So far, no regrets!
** Maybe then to continue with that idea of legibility, or refusal of legibility, how does that work with various stage presences or names? Is that connected to that refusal, or is it more about creating a separation between strands of work?
T: No, it is a kind of refusal. I would say because of this strategy of simultaneity, I think that there’s more legibility than most people have in their work. What I would say about the legibility and accessibility thing is that there’s a difference between your standard illegibility resulting from being artistically vague, and illegibility actively arising as a result of a producer putting a lot of effort into trying to communicate things that may be incomplete, contradictory and even hypocritical – things that are inherently ‘illegible.’ I think that that’s different from being in a high tower, or trying to do stuff that’s just dramatically or theatrically meant to exclude for no purpose other than artistic affect. If my projects enact exclusions, I think I make a best effort to contextualize those exclusions as they happen in relation to larger social dynamics.**
Where do we put our faith? In the fight for the future, certain things normally drop out, which isn’t an option for South African collective NTU (members Nolan Dennis, Bogosi SekhukhuniandTabita Rezaire). Keenly aware of the need to reconsider allegiances to separatist western narratives of progress, wherein only certain ideas get heard and coded into a future vision, their ongoing project, NTUSAVE is a mission to recover lost technologies. Broadly defined as both the ways of doing something, and the means of organisation, refering to both artefacts and methodologies, technologies aren’t neutral. “I believe strongly that traditions of African spirituality and her abundant, complex systems of knowledge have so much more to offer us than pride or self worth,” notes NTU member Sekhukhuni in a conversation carried out over Google Docs, talking about the process of rediscovery as an urgent step in self- preservation and welfare, with the “potential to holistically assist our daily lives in ways western intellectual thinking cannot.”
NTU Ubulawu (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artists + Auto Italia, London. Photo Corey Bartle Sanderson
Between April 29 to June 11, the trio presented NTU: Ubulawu, their first UK exhibition, which ran at London’s Auto Italia. On entering the unassuming Bethnal Green space on a sleepy Sunday, I’m met by the sounds of cascading water. The air is wet. It feels generative. By the time I get around to reading the press release, I am already transported. The group initially came together through shared interests in esoteric African history, spiritual traditions and cultures of technology, but behind NTU lies the fact that these proclaimed ‘digital-healers’ are survivalists too. For Sekhukhuni, the “desire to change the perceptions and visual language of what advanced technology can look like” is central. While we’re now arguably used (read, familiar and addicted) to the trans-meditative state supported by technologies such as the Internet, we shouldn’t be such sticklers. There are other things that can get us there. And, as it turns out, nature has its own ideas. Don’t let her humble aesthetics fool you, the saviour comes in unexpected hardware. Plant clippings and H2O might just be our most crucial resources in the fight for the future.
NTU Ubulawu (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artists + Auto Italia, London. Photo Corey Bartle Sanderson
Symbiosis is a major key here. CAD (computer-aided-design), InDesign and natural formation coalesce. Two screens, happily submerged in a pool of water, installed in a vitrine, fill the back room. White box structures resembling ancient temples or libation tables (a dedicated space to make liquid offerings to gods) are nestled into neat mounds of earth — like little ant hills scattered across the project space. In the tops of each of these structures, which look like crop circles, are different plant clippings, identified by corresponding graphic posters on the wall behind each mound. I learn about Umthunyelelwa – Leurostylia Capensis, Umsuzwane – Diospyros Galpinii, and Mthathe – Ptaeroxolyn Obliquum. Amidst these structures (based on designs from Kemetic tradition; a spiritual sect based on Ancient Egyptian religion) and the ‘video lagoon,’ NTU introduce us to their not-so-new materials: water, and the recommended accompaniment, Ubulawu, a psychoactive medicinal root, commonly known and used in South African tribes, like the Xhosa and Zulu, that induces a lucid-dream state. The hardware; the devices themselves, might not be what you’d expect but it’s the content that counts. NTU educate us on these natural technologies — invoking the psychotropic, the phytochemical and the ethnobotanic along the way.
We know water is vital to survival. We’re made up of 70 per cent of it. We know we must hydrate. That much is common knowledge. But I bet you didn’t know that water is conscious. According to NTU, water has been a free radical all along. And it isn’t only conscious material, it’s resistant technology.
NTU Ubulawu (2017) Detail view. Courtesy the artists + Auto Italia, London. Photo Corey Bartle Sanderson
Over the course of their research, (which Nolan explains over Google Doc combines “libation apparatuses, water therapy, cryptographic interfaces, alternative currencies, ancient knowledge, non-human intelligence, and hidden global networks”), the trio came across the laboratory experiments of Dr Masaru Emoto and Prof. Dr. Bernd Kröplin, whose findings suggests that water has a memory. That is to say that water archives its own experiences. In some sense, both black radical re-imaginings of the kidnap and transportation of enslaved bodies across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Americas known as the ‘Middle Passage,’ — like that of Detroit electronic duo Drexciya — and more ‘traditional’ accounts of the same gesture towards this understanding of water, as a conscious body carrying other denied bodies of knowledge. But Sekhukhuni laments that investigation often drops off, with little coverage of a time before this break, brought to you by what he calls ‘Western Capitalist Grammar.’ We don’t hear about Africa prior to this point — and what it has to offer the greater project of reimagining the African past-future and global present-future.
NTU: Ubulawu reaches back further, extending the investigation into water’s capabilities prior to this point. Water has a longer history of transformation and carriage, which isn’t as simple as our elementary scientific schooling of solid-liquid-gas. There’s more to know about how it can be at once a path of least resistance, a solvent and seemingly silent accommodating body, while simultaneously being one of most resistance. NTU continue this examination at its outer limits, “working with Ubulawu oneirogenic (dream-inducing) preparations of South African plants to recode properties of water as an agent of consciousness,” writes Nolan. Given growing fears around internet surveillance, especially in a city like London, it’s about time for finding other portals and channels of consciousness for sharing and connecting.
NTU Ubulawu (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artists + Auto Italia, London. Photo Corey Bartle Sanderson
By the time I leave Auto Italia, something has happened. Weeks later, the connection still hasn’t dropped. I sit down and write this article. Whatever they put in the water, into that space, is still in my system.**
“Subcultures can both recreate the values present in their time or reject them, in a multitude of different ways,” writes Ruth Angel Edwards via email about her practice, centred around a fastidious exploration of music subgenres, youth culture, sex and the politics of visibility. About to present a performance on April 8, with Emily Pope and other collaborating artists as part of the Feral Kin group exhibition programme, at London’s Auto Italia, Edwards renders youth and counter-culture as a reflection of the historical and geographical environments in which they appear. Focus is placed on the trajectories and lineages of subcultures as popularised, accessible articulation of a politics; alternate worlds within societies, distinct from mainstream culture, with their own conventions, shared value systems, and coded modes of expression.
Ruth Angel Edwards, ‘UNTITLED II’ (2016). Install view. Courtesy the artist + The Residence Gallery, London.
An underlying personal criticality structures Edwards’ insights into the current landscape of subgenres — particularly EDM and dubstep. For her research and performance, what is important is “trying to get to the bottom of where the impulses for these various developments in human history come from. At the same time, exploring the flaws present in these movements, as well as thinking about what was admirable, what mistakes can be learned from, and what’s useful to think about in relation to now.” As these cultural peripheries undergo processes of commodification, accountability and ethics must then be addressed accordingly. When does an act of resistance reflect the intentions of the purveyors? Or, when does it become a manifestation of augmented systems of control?
Addressing these concerns directly in the group exhibition Info Puraat The Residence Gallery in June of last year, Edwards presented textile-based, wearable sculptures adorned with beads and friendship bracelets characteristic of ornamentations and relics worn by EDM festival-goers. In so doing, these objects directly enter a conversation in which individuality and originality is observed and understood against the mechanisms of late capitalism and neoliberalism — a system fundamentally concerned with redefining its own contradictions through the exploitation of accessible social relations in order to survive.
Glastonbury 2015. Courtesy Ruth Angel Edwards.
Despite an ambivalence toward the ability to form a formidable resistance effort to the insidiousness of late capitalism, Edwards maintains that, at its core, there is something still present in anti-conformist and antagonistic movements and festivals, which is emancipatory, or at least reassuring and somehow necessary. These spaces serve as a kind of confirmation of themselves that people are reaching for, even if it’s no longer present, or harder to find in similar spaces. It’s with this in mind that Edwards discusses her continued research into the neoliberal landscape and alternative ways of living that exist at the intersection of fantasy and political praxis.
** Have you always had an interest in EDM and or dubstep?
RAE: I became interested in EDM, Dubstep and related subgenres for several reasons. First, I grew up around festivals and music subcultures, and have participated in them in various capacities. Second,there are traces of various historical underground dance music is still faintly present in today’s EDM – many of which originally held some political or oppositional meaning. But those traces have been divorced so thoroughly from their original contexts that they have been completely neutralised.
In terms of the production of the music, it’s this clean polished product made with absolute contrived precision. The club spaces and festivals that host EDM acts are sanitised, controlled environments. It’s cynical, apolitical music for a nihilistic, cynical time.
I have this conspiracy idea of EDM – that it’s propaganda made to encourage conformism under the guise of hedonism. It’s lyrics, the production, instrumentation, automation and the techniques used to emotionally and physically manipulate an audience can be read as an implementation of this. I feel like these genres perfectly reflect an era of late capitalism where recreation, communication, sexuality, personal expression are supposedly ‘free’ but are in fact highly mediated and augmented by systems of control.
Courtesy Ruth Angel Edwards.
** You contextualize female physicality as a way to explore the hedonism of dance culture. But also underlying dance culture and festival culture at large is a sense of free love / queerness / community and openness. How do you negotiate this complicated aspect of festival subculture, if at all?
RAE: ‘Festival culture’ has become a whole different phenomenon in the last 20 to 30 years. They have always been complex spaces — I never want to be seen as blindly romanticizing the past, and have looked a lot at subcultural histories from a feminist and queer perspective, aiming to expose the inconsistencies so often present with subculture/counter-cultural ‘utopian’ movements. But festivals were always, in theory at least, unregulated spaces –Temporary Autonomous Zones; Dionysian free spaces.
In recent years, there has been a massive shift toward the acceptability of these spaces, with certain festivals like Glastonbury, for example, in the UK, taking on mainstream status. But this mainstream acceptance and popularity has happened alongside the increased regulation of these spaces.
For me, the experience of festivals flips between a kind of horror and a deep affection. As a worker, music performer, and just attendee for a lot of my life, I have a complex relationship with them.
Courtesy Ruth Angel Edwards.
** With direct and indirect political considerations, your practice functions as an anthropological study. You often relate aspects of subculture to various key moments in culture and government policy. What notable developments have you been looking at recently?
RAE: I’ve recently been looking a lot at New Age Travelers in the UK, the different waves of the movement between the 70s and the 90s, and it’s continuing links with activism. After having spent a lot of time in California earlier in the year, I think a part of me was really interested in looking at something quite specifically British. Also, there’s been so much talk amongst London’s arts and political communities about alternative ways of living recently — the housing crisis, ideas of being driven out of the city, or rejecting the city, communality, rejecting the ‘normal’ setup.
RAE: The New Age Travelers movement was linked to squatting. Especially when it came to mass unemployment in the 80s, it was a logical choice for those affected to start living in vehicles. It feels relevant to look back on this movement now in these precarious times. Also, the movement’s political fragmentation feels interesting to reflect on — it was decentred quite literally in that it was not based in any one locality. It was also politically fragmented. It failed; for a variety of different reasons. That lifestyle was more or less completely shut down by the state.
My responses when researching the movement, and thinking over my own interactions with it over the years, was conflicted. But to me there’s definitely something inspiring and courageous about people attempting to live in that way-in a very literal and extreme way by today’s standards. It felt important.
Courtesy Ruth Angel Edwards.
** You’ve mentioned instances of cultural appropriation as they appear in festival culture, most recently within the New Age Travelers movement. What do you make of this tendency?
RAE: Looking back at New Age Travelers in the UK, some of the fashion and politics is definitely relatable to now, but this is one of the stand-out things, which makes it seem dated — dreadlocks (on white people), ‘ethnic’ clothing as fashion, and people living in Native American-style teepees completely out of context. It’s cringey at best, and at worst just offensive. The movement itself was born out of a rejection of mainstream Western society’s values, so I imagine it felt logical to look to other cultures as alternatives and to try and identify with them, to learn from and recreate them. Even as I’m writing this I’m hyper conscious of coming across as some kind of fucked up apologist(!).
In terms of what I make of this tendency, in this movement but also as it occurs in subcultures more broadly — of course I think it’s necessary to expose and put a stop to disrespectful, ignorant or offensive instances of appropriation. But, essentially, I always try to look at subcultures and the individuals involved in them with some level of humility, while staying critical.
Courtesy Ruth Angel Edwards.
** Two of your recent shows, Derivatives and Futures at Los Angeles’ Human Resources, and your solo exhibition, Ruth Angel Edwards, last year at Arcadia Missa, have accompanying written work. What relationship do you have with text?
RAE: With the show at Human Resources I was stressing-out massively. I wrote to Emily Pope, who is an artist friend who uses writing, to get her thoughts on the show and to help me write a blurb for the gallery. But then I just thought — why am I trying to shoehorn my actual thoughts on this into a particular, acceptable mould, to make the show conform to some accepted idea of intellectual authority or prestige? So I decided to just print the entire email out, with spelling and grammar mistakes in, and used that as the hand-out instead.
I’ve definitely felt constrained by the pressures to conform to certain writing styles — where artists are expected to write like academics. I guess I want to position myself against this. There are definitely some artists who do it really well, and that’s great. I just don’t think as an artist you should be expected to have to adopt this language. I’m anti-hierarchy, anti-elitism — I feel like multiple voices should be allowed in. And I’m definitely anti-professional performance! I think there’s a violence to this expected professionalism, which is making us all insecure, self-censoring, anxious wrecks with stunted communication abilities.
** Seamlessly moving between art and music — approaching each with careful research and criticality — you’ve recently ventured into radio with your project Got 2 b Radio. Can you please tell us more about the project and how broadcast factors into your creative production?
RAE: I’ve moved between art and music since as long as I can remember, really, but it was only in the last maybe two to three years that I ended up with a practice, which kind of merges both. Radio is great because it’s such a nice way to connect with an audience in whatever space they’re in, as part of their day. Got 2 b is a monthly radio programme I started with friend and artist Emily Pope. It airs on Resonance FM every fourth Monday of every month. Me and Emily work on at least one new sound piece together for every show, as well as mixing it up with music, other individual sound and spoken pieces, and other’s guest contributions. I guess it’s more pop cultural than the sound work I do on my own, and looks at culture more broadly, at what we describe as ‘neoliberal landscapes,’ like advertising, film etcetera. The tone is slightly different. Emily is an incredible writer and spoken word artist, with a very unique ‘voice’ within London’s emerging artist scenes. The show moves between humour and being really abrasive! It’s a fun project to work on.
I feel very lucky to have got to know some of the most incredible communities and individuals through music, who have had and continue to have the most inspiring and positive influences on my life. I believe in music communities so hard!**
Metahaven is presenting solo exhibition Information Skies at London’s Auto Italia,opening October 4 and running to October 30.
This the Dutch art and design studio’s first UK solo exhibition, opening concurrently at Mumbai Art Room in India. The group will present their 2016 film ‘Information Skies’, which is informed by VR and dramatises experiential technology. The film uses live footage and animation, while thematically exploring concepts of authenticity positioned as “fictional provocations” and questions belief systems. The film includes a young couple in a forest with warriors, dragons, and dreams.
The show also includes a documentary film installation entitled ‘The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)’, a 70-minute “dive into online and offline truths, fictions, and their sponsors”. Benjamin H. Bratton, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, and Peter Pomerantsev offer commentary in the video, which identifies “how planetary-scale interface culture is transforming geopolitics and state power”.
Together both films form a “new cinematic topography, creating fragmented territories of images and suggestions, and building a worldview that is at once attractive and terrifying”.
The Dream Babes intersectional queer experience programme is on at London’s Auto Italia, opening September 7 and running to September 9.
The long-term project, made in collaboration with Victoria Sinfeatures artists using speculative fiction as a productive medium and is comprised of many iterations, public moments, and opportunities to come together. The press release states, “in the face of representational violence, speculative fiction is a productive medium to invade existing narratives that naturalize normative states of sex, gender and race, imaging futurity that does not depend on existing historical and social infrastructure”.
On September 7, the programme begins with ‘Resis’dance DJ Workshop’. It aims to give an opportunity for female, trans, and non-binary people to learn the basics of DJing in a welcoming, non judgemental environment. Cassandre Greenberg and Christopher Kirubi form the duo Special Tears and will perform live and present ‘CRY BABY: Get Close’, some notes on desperation and closeness. Their presentation and performance follows with DJ sets from Ann Ayoola, Oretha, cruise_control and Manara.
September 8 begins with Evan Ifekoya and Victoria Sin, who invite attendees to “partake in a moment of queer collectivity focusing on experiences of nightlife and the physical within the social body”. Chooc Ly Tan’s Spacer Woman will DJ after, presenting a varied selection influenced by Hip Hop, Afrobeat, Bollywood, experimental Dakbe, and high-voltage Electro.
Delany Fanclub opens on September 9, an informal afternoon screening group, looking at the work of science fiction writer and essayist Samuel Delany. Followed by ‘Lipstix and Lipsynx Performative Workshop’ with Adam Saad and Raju Rage. The workshop intends to uncover secret present selves and open up queer portals of self-affirmation for “moments of future whateva”. The programme closes with a DJ set from Sydney UltraOmni.
Featuring is 4th Floor by Majd Al-Hamwi and Lawand Zaza and other short films made through the festival’s workshops and grants programmes. This is the first independent screening in London leading up from its participation in Auto Italia’s exhibition programme Hailweed, now extended until July 24.
Established in 2014, the festival creates a “unique platform to encourage professional and amateur directors to produce new work using mobile cameras” inside Syria, despite the hard security conditions. Thus far, it has taken the work of Syrian directors to more than 20 cities around the world.
The exhibition space will become a host for a set of “wild (eco)systems” in a collective imagining of “formats for the usage of artistic space” exploring the relationship between artist and institution. This includes presenting work that investigates notions of “dependency and parasitic potential within oppressive infrastructures” whether legal, emotional, financial or biopolitical, along with ideas of “sovereignty, identity, care and self-interest”.
The event is part of the show’s performance programme called Sunrise Sunset which recently featured ‘Clapback’ by niv Acostathat aqnbreviewed earlier this month, and follows a live work, Litmus Shuffle, by Patrick Staff and Cara Tolmie on April 7.
During the day Auto Italia, Anna Barham, Lawrence Lek, Emily Roysdon and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa will look to hone in on and literalise the relationship between observer and observed. They will be both present and presenting works that focus in on moments where meaning materialises, asking if live art and its participation can act like an object that is treated, embodied and imbued by its maker.
New York-Stockholm based Roysdon has worked with KW to develop the day’s pacing and spatial arrangement. The artist with her collaborators will also perform her ongoing work ‘UNCOUNTED [Performance 7]’, short and intermittent readings of Roysdon’s randomised script in the courtyard, where the street meets the space, while Ramírez-Figueroa will combine bedtime rituals with printmaking in a dreamlike mediative scene as the day comes to a close.
The London-based artist-run space organisers Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest and Marleen Boschen will speak with Feigelfeld, academic coordinator of the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University Lüneburg, on questions raised by the exhibition theme inspired by art pioneers General Idea. The Canadian collective’s work preempted the viral dimension of the hypercirculating image in contemporary culture by decades, most famously with their Imagevirus series.
Th exhibition features work by the Lensbased class of Hito Steyerl, including Pauline Niedermayer, Bruno Siegrist and Till Wittwer among others, and follows ideas of anarchic images in the digital era, their circulation and representation and the “activist potential of the image in a contemporary discourse of hyper circulation”.
Julia Tcharfas, Tim Ivison, Rachel Pimm, and George Moustakas, ‘Recent Work By Artists’ (2013). Commissioned by Auto Italia. Courtesy the artists.
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As part of the On Coping: A Reading for Liverpool project at Auto Italia, artist Jaakko Pallasvuo will be leading a clay workshop entitled ‘Hobby Point’ at Liverpool’s The Royal Standard on July 17 from 2:30 to 5:30pm.
The project comes as part residency, part research, and part public programme, bringing in international artists to form “emotional alliances and collective strategies” to counter the compromising social and economic pressures of the modern art world and create a shared space for exchange and support.
Pallasvuo will be hosting a workshop teaching participants to handle clay while viewing a video, accompanied by a discussion about art, about hobbies, and about “what’s fun, what’s unprofessional and what’s worth doing”. Joining him to participate in the project are a handful of other artists, including Erica Scourti and Marleen Boschen.
Art/ Work Association (A/WA)is putting together a series of readings and workshops titled Future Polities and taking place at Auto Italia‘s King Cross space from November 24 through to January 5.
A/WA exists as an association of “creative workers” and artists churning out a self-generated programme of talks, workshops, reading groups, screenings, seminars and critical feedback sessions. For their latest series, they’ve joined forces with sci-fi and future-oriented art magazine, Living In The Future, for a five-session programme running through the next six weeks.
Based on the premise that science fiction offers “means with which to critique and reimagine the present”, Future Polities invites a selection of artists, writers, and cultural theorists to discuss future possibilities, including a group discussion with Ben Vickers, the initiator of unMonastery, a reading of Ursula Le Guin‘s The Dispossessed, and a discussion with Helen Hester.
Auto Italia is hosting the new POLYMYTHx Miss Information project at their London space from October 4 to November 16.
The Kate Cooper-(co)run gallery is bringing in the group project, which features (among others) April Greiman, Pablo Jones-Soler, Metahaven, Holly Herndon, and Pinar&Viola, to their Kings Cross space to explore the “narratives and grammar enmeshed in the technologically accelerated now”. Using scripted realities and speculative fiction as tools for re-imagining, POLYMYTH examines modern day myths and how they figure in society.
The selected contributors work together to explore the magic realism of the network(ed) culture, the simultaneous and parallel identities afforded by it, and the frictions and fractures of contemporary hyperconnectivity.
Greiman’s work visualises aspects of the MIS-infoscape of sea and air, Metahaven and Herndon play with avatar anxiety, Pinar&Viola examine the quest for unconditional love, and Jones-Soler provides that augmented interior within which the group show rests.
