Alex Billingham - raw hide

photos by Manuel Vason

Flesh uncurling

Dirty feet in rainbow lights

Soft, soft


Scratching emergency blankets

And memories


The sound of quiet violence

Pushing glitter in wounds


A temporary sustained collapse

Pouring into flesh twitches

Holding silence with shaving foam and layers of glitter itches


Onto elbows and knees

Caressing necks and thighs

Pushing on layers to take flight again

In strong arm UV light power poses


We shuffle in our skin watching you shredding


How do you scratch a layer on?

The body erratic and offering

Silently you drip in blue light

 

I forget your pool exists and think about forgotten wombs

About birthings that have been long before

And birthings you perform yourself now


I pour red wine for comfort

Into your long red latexted whimpers

Pulling at your heart

Reaching for the sky with tiny cries

Strong arm fading


Bandages of pink breasts

Cut our breathing with every sticky stretch

While chests of milky breasts wheeze

My nostrils fill with your shaking

The lights fade into melancholic rainbows as you peel your mouth off

Spitting on gold

Removing genitals

Bandages of pink breasts

Cut our breathing with every sticky stretch

While chests of milky breasts wheeze

My nostrils fill with your shaking

The lights fade into melancholic rainbows as you peel your mouth off

Spitting on gold

Removing genitals


What does it mean to endure?


My questions get stuck in the air

Waiting on the sounds forming to be pushed out your mouth


A lifetime of growing and removing layers of becoming that same flesh again and again


Scratchy maps emerge

Fireworks bang outside as I watch the glitter ripple around your belly button


The joy of the unspectacular


Tiny latex mountains form beneath you

Pushed by palms from your womb

Tenderly removing your foreskin

text by Bean

Niko Wearden - Selkie Skin

photos by Manuel Vason

Felt fingers folding

Stealing words



Fingers unfurl

Woolen moustaches of sailors

The calm before the storm

Twin bodies

Eggless and eggy



Membranes

Fibres of souls

Stuck in history

Archaic analogue antique

Unlearning



A memory I can’t recall

A sadness I don’t know I know

Amplified by plastic



And the beauty of trying.

text by Bean

Stare me down

To nothing

I know

And everything

Pockets,

Always pockets

And heartbeats

Racing



To unframe yourself

Always,

Always tiny invisible tensions

Always

Uncontained

Always,

Always my eyes can not be wide enough to contain it



Always silence & violence remains



Our guts curdle your milk

text by Bean

Sacred skeletal wings

Trying to take off through heavy dust

Fighting



Spitting golden threads on mirrored wounds

Remaking

Bloody ‘I’s

In latex gloves

Eratic and urgent openings



Kneeling

Griefing

Sighs

Needles of labour and legacy

Dirtied knees for our collective prayers

Ware new paths, new patterns

To fly



A disobedience

A commitment to dirt



Eyes burn,

Pointing the future into existence

text by Bean

Alex Billingham is a genderqueer performance artist and Associate Curator for Vivid Live, whose practice mixes endurance, visual arts, low-fi tech and installation. Visceral and physically exhausting, pushing what their body can take, trusting their safety to the audience, stripping away supports to leave something tender and violent. A fascination with the fetishization of Nuclear dread and an obsession with outdated hopes for the future all bleed into the work.

RAWHIDE is abject, touching on body dysmorphia, scar tissue, locked in syndrome, evolution, sheading skin, body horror and learning to love yourself Scratching away layers of latex and skin, the length of the piece takes its toll, physically and mentally breaking down the performance. Everyone feels uncomfortable in their own skin, like fighting a losing battle with their own body. “I’ve experienced body dysmorphia, considering surgery and eventually learning to embrace my own body.”

thinking about icarus and deleuze and gender and my father. this is a leap of faith. the purpose is never to fly.

Joseph Morgan Schofield is a performance artist working across the body, text and endurance work.

in exploring the relationships that different types of memory have to gestures, images and materials, selina bonelli is interested in how our bodies make sense of things that are unspeakable, uncommunicable, and how this affects us both personally and societally. selina bonelli’s work looks at the effects of the deterritorialization of materials and actions in order to approach a language beyond the inadequacies it presents us with. threads and odours form an unreliable combine that sits precariously between action and stillness. in the encounter i'm looking at how we re-member the past: exploring our collective amnesia through action, gesture and the relationship between object and material.

Niko Wearden is a performance and visual artist interested in queer intimacies and ways of being okay alone. Niko works in and through spaces with others, their work is often durational, productive or destructive, and could be described as ritual, rite of passage or space for transition/ transformation. They work with the body and with physical materials.

Niko has shown work extensively across the UK and Finland, as well as internationally, including at The Royal Academy in London.

Felt (1)

A kind of cloth made by rolling and pressing wool or another suitable textile accompanied by the application of moisture or heat, which causes the constituent fibres to mat together to create a smooth surface. - Oxford English Dictionaries (2018)

Something about the sea.

A general muddle of yearning and un-belonging. Heading north.

This performance included live musical accompaniment from Logan Johnson.

I cannot take the future, or ritual, for granted. A future ritual is something we do together and I definitely don’t agree with all of you. How to be together, then? How to remember what we came for?

In order to watch, to be there, receiving, thinking with, thinking about, F U T U R E R I T U A L - a series of performances, a series of series, a plural in the singular, a singular plurality, a thread, a plait - I’ll agree to disagree; to struggle, to writhe, to wiggle with my eyes and words, to embrace partiality, to allow the risk of cliché, the cliché of risk, to bounce off my burning body and onto yours.

The body burns because it’s embarrassing to watch performance, to perform audiencehood, to acquiesce to encounters you never sought out or imagined; to allow intimacy into square feet you would rather keep for yourself; a fragile, unsafe self. The mutual suspension of comfort for something else is perhaps the most precious ritual of all, though, so for now I agree to be thrown sideways into other people. Into other people’s futures. Into other people’s rituals. Let’s begin, I think. I stop thinking.

Kitty Fedorec has a suitcase of cassette tapes. She’s gothed-up, wig flying in our faces, daring us to diss or squirm or admire too lovingly, revealing our own fandoms, our own dominions. I lean forward. There are atlases on the floor. She stands on them. A string of dances, steady and studied.

She dances in defiance of something and I wonder whether every dance ever is in defiance of something. I think about my recent desire for only dances, no dancers. She speaks about mental health and feeling under constant threat. She speaks about the nation state being unwell. “The nation state wishes it was an eagle.”

She conducts a participatory war game with two audience members and I think about individual identity within and against national identity; the requirement to participate in nationhood, to “be a good sport”. I feel caught out; I’ve said ‘yes’ to this; to party politics; to paying taxes; to pressing send; to submission. Perhaps we can’t make art without making conversation with the parasites; the war machines. We’re already good sports for turning up, turning out, turning our love for possibility into social capital. To turn away is to taint the possibility of togetherness actually being pleasurable at some point in the future. I wonder whether the nation is always doomed to make war, whether the individual is always doomed to be a national treasure, whether outbreaks of violence are always synonymous with war and what would it be to violently break the state, our collective state of loneliness; the individual, the art institution, the dancer, the family, the monarchy, the dutiful subject, the artwork-as-commodity, the infinite misunderstandings of each other, into a billion shards? I wonder about this country. I wonder how to get rid of the billionaires. I wonder about sunken ships. And sunken desires for escape. How to raise them from the bottom of the sea?

I can’t remember how she ended up naked, but I do remember her singing with her band, which suddenly arose from the corner of the room, like solid ghosts. Gold leaf falls off her face. She’s only wearing a biker jacket, and a pair of Ray-Bans. I want to hang off her. Every word.

Kitty Fedorec, Some Day Dominion, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

Joseph Morgan Schofield acts with and upon their body, calmly not-so-calmly piercing skin as if it was fabric. Not-so-calm because it requires me to be there, the witness, diluted in my witnessing, distracted, wanting rather to drape myself over the person next to me and breathe only in for a while, as Joseph takes care of breathing out. Or is it the other way around? Joseph does the breathing in, we do the breathing out. The tip of my tongue presses lightly into my front teeth and I suck the sides of this stupid, mute, always-active organ inwards, creating a rush of cold air between top and bottom jaw. “Thssshhhhhh.”
 

Would I bite the bullet? Would I grab the needle? Would I feel pleasure? I feel only their body matters. I feel heroic for not running up and saving them and then I feel stupid and then I feel sad and then I feel brave and then I feel hot. We’ve all agreed to watch and learn. We consent to every moment because they’ve consented to the longest moment and all the moments and all the labour before and afterwards. The cleaning, the white flannel that turns red, the tentative, too-casual post-show discussions, the avoidances, the calm after the storm, the storm swirling above and around us as they tip hot wax onto their arm.

There’s a tension between action and impact, reaction and smooth, calm observation. Body as observant subservience. Malleable bloodstream. Tightening skin. Decisions made long ago coming back to serve us an enormous platter of fuck-the-present, hold-on-tight, simply-close-your-eyes-if-you-need-to feeling.

I’m starting to really want a tattoo.


Joseph Morgan Schofield, yesterday I dreamt of flying, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

DAS GLAMOUR are two but actually three people. I’m reminded of a Twitter meme about an imagined future with no men. Funny how fast a group of three becomes societal in scale. Perhaps I’ve re-internalised the compulsion to reproduce that haunted me for a while between 2014 and 2017. I can see them reproducing like spider plants - asexually - which isn’t to say they don’t have sex, but that sex is at last discontinuous with making babies - before and beyond my eyes and into a future beyond patriarchy, a world and word that feels so vintage already. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Perhaps you’re not ready to sign up to this spider future. In any case, I’m not entirely sure how we get from here to there without killing anyone - cookshops of the future, etc - so for now I’ll scale it down and focus on these three; this time.

It was 2018. It was autumn. I was wearing black. I was squatting, open-mouthed, with a group of other open mouths in a recently-defunded arts space to watch silently one of the most unapologetically constructivist, bish bash bosh, open-heartedly curious, in-love utopic, choreographic body-voice-drum-song works I’ve ever squatted open-mouthed in front of.
They yodelled. They stood on boxes. They stamped. Their voices were clear and calm and technical and guttural without the machismo of musicians and definitely none of the desperate, aspirational subjecthood of dancers. They just sang because singing is an animal faculty. They moved because moving is in them. Because singing and moving and drumming are pure vibration. Pure desire.


DAS GLAMOUR, In Iridescent Iteration, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

Are they the vision of a future with only dances, no dancers? Who is the artist here? Who is the muse? Who has been taught? Who did the teaching? Who downloaded the holy text and from where? Who is this serving if not everybody? Who are they if not the ghosts of a future ritual without the need for fixed meanings or labour-as-we-know-it or nations or property or anxiety, except the continuous consideration of which pleasure we’ll take next?

Is there violence in dragging ritual from its deep history and chucking it into the future? Or chucking the future upon it? Maybe. But then I’m not much of a pacifist. I like things that smash together. I like shards. I like to read futures from fragments. We’re all witches here, DAS GLAMOUR seem to say, and don’t care for our agreement or disagreement. Just that we’re here. And it’s not that special. Perhaps performance isn’t that special, just unusual.

How many times have you slipped through time into a dark room to watch silently the glitter, the reddening skin, the guitar strings, the erotic implications, the lighting rig, the other nervous witches? Let’s assume there is the potential to agree on a future. Or many intersecting futures, at least. You cannot produce your future separately from mine, or theirs, so don’t even try. Don’t even try.

DAS GLAMOUR sing, and their song stays with me:

Luke Jordan, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

Sean O’Driscoll, datum, 2018. Photo by Asher Fynn.

In Iridiscent Iteration a lure-dance paired with a work out on chewing gum. In Iridiscent Iteration involves and explores the harmonies and dissonances between alpine rituals, Schuhplatteln, self-optimization and fitness cult, Aerobic, goat figures and processes of artistic production. By appropriating and fragmneting the movement material of Areobic and Schuhplatteln a new independent luredance emerges. Possibly the lure-dance will attract queer-feminist goat creatures. New dances and songs are combined to a ritual of self-empowerment, agency and celebrations of pleasure.

The performance duo DAS GLAMOUR was formed in 2018 by Bernadette Laimbauer and Christa Wall and is based in Linz and Vienna. Their work is a sensual investigation of folk rituals, customs, iterations, circuits and transformations to their queer-feminist potentials.

thinking about icarus and deleuze and gender and my father. this is a leap of faith. the purpose is never to fly.

Joseph Morgan Schofield is a performance artist working across the body, text and endurance work.

séance: communication between dead and living, past / future and the present.possession: duality of the body as body possessed by an alien materiality and self possessing body, whilst also having the capacity to be possessed through an affective immersive experience leading to a lose of subjectivity in the rhythmic materiality of sensation, a ‘nocturnal anarchy of the senses’.exorcism: cathartic expulsion of unwanted elements from the mind / body.

Luke Jordan’s works take many forms; experimental sound, live art, installation, sculpture, photography, video and text; often combining many of these elements. The artist is interested in speculations upon the temporality of the human as one among many decaying material forms, haunted by imagined pasts and futures, unexplored territories, communications with the unknown, and by the vast unknowable, without and within the human body. His work incorporates manifestations of primal and cultural anxieties, in material decay, corruption and impurity through the emergence of hybrid forms and figures, disrupting the borders of the human, and of ‘civilization’.

seán o’driscoll is an emerging performance artist , recently graduating from warwick university . seán's previous work , WAH (a waluigi Clown) , showed at the camden people's theatre in april 2018 (video link available hmu). new twitter & instagram pals are always welcome (bearing gifts or not) : @seanodriscoll_

‘first-footing' is a waning scottish new years ritual , wherein the fortune of the year hinges on the first person to be welcomed through the door bearing symbolic gifts . in the wake of GDPR and echoing y2k, datum reduces the first-foot and gifts into information and code , and explores the relationship between distrust in technology and crossing thresholds of time.

Kitty Fedorec is a dance artist and perpetual teenage-goth. Her work is informed by her relationship with mental health and neuro-divergence. It looks at the need of humans to control their environments, internal and external, and its expression through a spectrum of rituals, compulsions and religious practices. The Misters of Circe are a gender non-conforming Sisters of Mercy tribute.

Some Day Dominion is inspired by current global politics, historical echoes, my grandparents' experience as refugees, a geopolitical theory from the start of the twentieth century, subculture as refuge and the music of The Sisters of Mercy. It sits between live art, dance, ritual and gig, with music from gender-fucked tribute, The Misters of Circe; an act of phonomancy to create a protective pocket goth world, beyond borders.

Within the matrix of hetero-patriarchy Icarus was suitably punished (death by drowning) for he did not head the instructions of The Father. Bad boy. Yawn. You however, through a poiesis of queer(ed) futility, radiated the knowledge that something is created through a departure from, or failure to adhere to, hetero-patriarchal scripts.

We too have wanted more, refused instruction, scorched our wings and fallen. But we have not drowned. We are awash in an infinite ocean of potential. An Icarian Sea.

I see you.

You messaged me the other day with this quote (after witnessing a performance from Nicholas Tee); “No satisfaction whatever at any time... There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching...” - flying or swimming - “...and makes us more alive than the others.” The quote is from the late choreographer, Martha Graham.

As I watched you manifest your fingers as feathers the transformation was choreographic and outright. I no longer saw fingers, I saw the dance of feather tipped wings in flight. I saw blood fall from your brow. I saw the damage from previous flights.

I remembered and felt that we are not drowning and our unrest reaps its own rewards in our Life.


Joseph Morgan Schofield, yesterday I dreamt of flying. Photo by Jemima Yong.

I knew you were in the room but I forgot. I was awaiting your entrance and then I remembered (you have always been here). I had just finished speaking with you. I knew what to expect yet still your presence evaded us. Present yet absent from view like so much of our non-binary cultural and history, slowly bleeding through. Quietly, resolutely authoring attention and futures.

As the first drop of (your) blood dispersed on, into and through (it’s a spectrum) the white barrier obscuring any view of your body from us; I remembered the missing, I remembered their trace.

Specifically I remembered the missing Ana Mendieta, recalling the traces and Body Tracks of where flesh once was. I thought about the invisible, monumental grief which occupies the location of loss. What have we lost? What are we loosing? And in a state of searching what will we find beyond it?

The boldest bloodstain permeated at mouth height, silently screaming. A sharp intake of breath and digitally you spoke:

Mining Mountains

Our Ore
Wild Silence

Mother Bent

You stretched time through pitch, pace and loop. We went deep. Deep into the Moors.

Iron rich,
menstruation led.

Northern (m)others wept.

The future is not female. Our bodies remain invisible.

I hear you and remember that our pasts have seeded our futures and that we are here to tend and grow.


Alicia Radage, M, 2018. Photo by Jemima Yong.

In numerous creation myths the Golem is an anthropomorphic being, magically created from inanimate material (usually clay or dust) by the Divine or those closely related to it. The Golem is matter without form, body without soul. The Golem is imperfect. The raison d'etre of the Golem is servitude. We are all Golems beneath Capitalist, Nation State rule.

I M M O R (T) A L I T Y. Bring the Anarchy.

As your golemesque mask quickly erodes you refuse any position of servitude. YOU bring forth form from the clay though the actions and intentions of your body. You forge the phallus and leave it trivial in your wake.

A forbidden fruit becomes form without matter as you tether it, creating cartographies with string and clay.

I M M O R (T) A L I T Y.

You shed your face once and for all. You have turned the Golem back into clay. How can we convince our siblings to do the same?

I remember that NONE ARE FREE UNTIL ALL ARE FREE. I remember where we are and sigh.


Eunjung Kim, Temporal Fragments,  2018. Photo by Jemima Yong.

Nerve endings are concentrated in our hands so that we can feel the slightest variations in texture, pressure & temperature and according to philosophies of reflexology; pressure points corresponding to all our major organs and bodily systems are located in the hands and wrists. In numerous faiths the hand is a symbol of protection and healing.

As you kneaded the glass shards into the cement with your palms, a fine dust rose, visible in the beam of the spotlight. I thought about razor edges of tiny particles and my mirror neurons fired, yet I remained indifferent for it appeared that you did as well.

What happens to ones psyche when one engages the entire body through sharp, focalised pressure and micro piercing of the hands?

Through constant manipulations of the shards you flattened the mass (your hands did their protective work) before walking, kneeling and laying naked on the glass. I remember the continuous scrapping and clinking of the glass-on-cement as a drawn sonic ode to things that shatter.

I remembered we are sensitive. I remembered, we are all in need of healing.


Hellen Burrough, 2018. Photo by Jemima Yong.

The first step in manifesting desire is imagining. The second step is the focusing of intent. You imagined a future beyond global capitalism, hetero-patrichary, white supremacy & coloniality. Together we must focus our intent. Yet these technologies of magic alone will not cease the systems that enslaves us.

As above. So Below. Everything is relative.

In executing a couplet of performances (performance lecture & ritual performance), you facilitated a straddling of the intellectual and the intuitive. In leading ritual under a waxing crescent moon you positioned us between cycles of banishing and manifesting.

When Persephone, Daughter of Demeter (Goddess of All That Grows), ate pomegranate seeds from the hand of Hades (God of the Dead) the seasons were born, she fell in love and happy became Queen of The Underworld. Forevermore Persephone would move between the worlds. Goddess above, Queen below.

As we shared in Persephone’s ritual we acknowledged a sacred truth. We must move between worlds, learning to thrive in all. Our intentions to dismantle hetero, white, patriarchal politics of coloniality will not manifest overnight and they will not manifest as absolute. We must thrive here as well, as Queens in the dark. We will thrive here as well, Goddesses of Light.


Anni Movsisyan, Ritual for Renewal, 2018. Photo by Jemima Yong.

Alicia Radage’s practice spans Performance, Photography and Digital Collage. Their work has been shown across the U.K., Europe, Latin America and India and they have been supported by The British Council. They have undertaken residencies across the U.K., Brazil and India. Radage collaborates with a number of arts collectives, has close collaborations with individual artists and has curated a number of events in the U.K.

M works to seep through our silencing of queered bodies. Wading through the visible, the invisible and what exists in between, M paints images and soundscapes in an attempt to find other ways of knowing.

Hellen Burrough is an artist and producer living and working in London, UK. Hellen works intimately and violently with her own body as material, making live performance work to explore the transgressive feminine body and examine ideas of ritual, pain and healing.

A fairy tale smashed up and expectations shattered.

Our glittering future, broken up and razor sharp.

In a room full of shattered glass shards, a body works to make peace with the pieces left behind.

“My artistic practice is based in making rituals, presentations, illustrations, charms, garments and music that aim to explore alternate versions of how we can be in this world. I fold the past, present and future into each other by revisiting herstories, forms of knowledge and practices that have either been purposefully erased or forgotten as we try to survive and resist the oppressive structures we are being forced to live with.” 
Anni Movsisyan

"A study of a West Asian Diasporan's use of magical practices in the early 21st century"

Pardis is a Herstory Teacher from an optimistic future that is borne of a radical shift in peoples' ways of thinking. Pardis will present their Herstorical research on a particular 21st century artist's practices of growth and resistance against the violent world she found herself in, in order to learn more about how their world came to be.

Ritual for Renewal invites participants to eat and drink from a shared pomegranate. We will take a moment to reflect, let go of that which our hearts and minds no longer need to hold onto, and plant seeds of intentions, whether they be personal, collective, political, metaphysical, etc. The choice of fruit aligns with the season and is inspired by the Tree of Life, which has been represented by the pomegranate in West Asian cultures. Ritual for Renewal is a performance with a limited capacity.

Eunjung Kim, a Korean artist based in London. Kim’s practice centres on the process of becoming - the discovery of a sense of agency outside of the limits of social reality and the stability of identity. Through relational textures and encounters, Kim questions the relationship between the machinery of repression and the realm of freedom that erupts within difference. Kim has performed at The Photographers’ Gallery, Limehouse Town Hall, and Steakhouse Live Festival at Artsadmin and Live Art Development Agency, London and Green on Red Gallery, Ireland.

Inspired by the ancient East Asians' shamanistic myth, Mago, Temporal Fragments open the myth and will seek a fragment of it. Desiring ultimate present of the myth that is not affected by existing historical and social power structure. In the present of doing and sharing this work the mythology fractures and decays the chain of signification and the trace forms a new temporal map of geographic formations without any boundaries.

thinking about icarus and deleuze and gender and my father. this is a leap of faith. the point is never to fly.

joseph morgan schofield is a performance artist working across the body, text and endurance work.