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The fog of the here-and-now is ossifying. Contemporary culture is characterised by states of anxiety, alienation and exile. Breaking with these states requires a series of temporal maneuvers. Ritual is an apt symbolic technology for this work, for ritual is a way of entering time and rendering it habitable through communion.

~ Joseph Morgan Schofield

FUTURERITUAL is an artist-led research project considering the use of ritual in contemporary queer and performance cultures. FUTURERITUAL is conceived and convened by artist Joseph Morgan Schofield and this iteration features performances and contributions by Benjamin Sebastian, Charlie Ashwell, Daniella Valz Gen, Es Morgan, Soojin Chang, Rubiane Maia and Teo Ala-Ruona.

Identifying performance art as a potent contemporary modality for ritual, the performance works and accompanying sonic essay of this FUTURERITUAL represent a plurality of responses to this question: how can the archaic technology of ritual be deployed in the divination, manifestation and sustentation of something else - of alternative [queer] futurities, wherein states of belonging (in difference) are felt deeply and more readily?

The works in this FUTURERITUAL activate the ICA between 18 and 29 May, and investigate memory, sex, time, collaboration, ecology, power, alienation, intimacy and belonging. The body remains at the heart of each work, immediate and autonomous. Identity, however, is frequently destabilised and diffused towards the imagination of other ways of being in other possible worlds.

The live programme features four performance art works and Summoning, a workshop exploring queer kinship and collaboration, and is accompanied by Divinatory Strategies, a sonic essay, available online.


Background Image: Rubiane Maia, Every Time I Trace The Horizon, My Hands Catch Fire [Book-Performance, Chapter III], 2022. Photo by Zack Mennell.






Bios & credits


FUTURERITUAL is conceived and convened by Joseph Morgan Schofield.

This programme features Benjamin Sebastian, Charlie Ashwell, Daniella Valz Gen, Es Morgan, Soojin Chang, Rubiane Maia and Teo Ala-Ruona.

This iteration of FUTURERITUAL was commissioned by the ICA (London) and supported by Arts Council England.

With thanks to Sara Sassanelli, Ash  McNaughton, and Anna Goodman.

Benjamin Sebastian

~ performance

Benjamin Sebastian (b. 1980, Cairns*, Queensland, Australia) is a trans-disciplinary artist-curator based in London, whose practice spans curating, installation, writing, image making, sculpture, moving image, new media and performance.

Their practice might be imagined as a constellation of mirrors; reflecting aspects of the body, time & spaces they inhabit - or - as queer world-making experiments manifested through processes of bricolage; navigated by erotic and esoteric methodologies.

Sebastian understands their artistic work as sensual acts of living turned anarcho-queer technologies in the aid of trans*, decolonial & trans-humanist endeavour. All driven by their neuro-divergent and non-binary embodiment.

They are a frequent collaborator of entities, individuals & institutions, and co-founding director of ]performance s p a c e [ and VSSL Studio.

*The Gimuy Walubara Yidinji and the Yirrganydji peoples are the traditional custodians of Cairns and surrounding district. Gimuy is the traditional place name for the area Cairns City now occupies. Sebastian wishes to pay respect to the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji and Yirrganydji Elders, both past and present, and extend that respect to all Indigenous Australians.

https://benjamin-sebastian.com 
@benjaminsebastian


Charlie Ashwell

~ sonic essay

Charlie Ashwell is a dance artist working with choreography, writing, and dramaturgy. Having graduated from London Contemporary Dance School in 2009, they performed with Seke Chimutengwende & Friends, Dog Kennel Hill Project, Janine Harrington, Florence Peake and English National Opera, among others. They have worked as dramaturg with Seke Chimutengwende, Es Morgan and Greg Wohead, alongside teaching technique, improvisation and choreography at the University of Roehampton. Charlie completed a Masters of Research in Choreography and Performance in 2014, going on to make solo work 'Banishing Dance' and duet 'spells' with Es Morgan. Their ongoing research explores the notion of 'Choreography as an Occult Practice', engaging the hidden, the spectral, the magical and the prophetic in dance performance.

https://www.charlieashwell.com


Daniella Valz Gen

~ sonic essay, written documentation

Daniella Valz Gen is a poet, artist and card reader. Their work explores the interstices between languages, cultures and value systems with an emphasis on embodiment and ritual, through the mediums of performance, installation, conversation and text.

Valz Gen is the author of the poetry collection Subversive Economies (PSS 2018). Their prose has been published in various art and literary journals such as Lish, SALT. Magazine, Paperwork Magazine and The Happy Hypocrite amongst others. They’re currently developing the next stage of their project (be)longing, a series of immersive elemental rituals.

Valz Gen has been focusing the last two years on integrating their oracular practice with their art and poetry. They run monthly gatherings exploring poetics in relation to the symbolism of Tarot cards within the container of Sacred Song Tarot.

https://daniellavalzgen.net


Georgie (Rei-n) Lo

~ performance

Georgie (Rei-n) Lo is an artist and ritual somatics practitioner working with a toolkit of yoga, tarot, dance, contact improvisation and performance art. The themes of her current research are animism and the Dao, psychogeography, land relations and situationism, games and play.  The arising query of her work is: can we find movement to play in the flow of perceived restrictions towards liberation?


Joseph Morgan Schofield

~ convenor, performance, sonic essay & workshop

Joseph Morgan Schofield (they/them, b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) uses performance, moving image, writing and curation to create ‘queer ritual action’ which explores desire, grief, ecology and the wilding of queer and trans* futurity. Their practice is relational, emerging through encounters between the sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body and a host of human/other-than agents.

They have engaged with the South Pennine Moors as muse and collaborator for a number of years, and also work responsively to other sites and contexts on different time scales. Through practices of channeling, duration, exhaustion and divination, Joseph’s works hold space for acts of mourning, yearning, processing, dreaming and communing.

Gathering and facilitation are central to Joseph’s practice, and their artistic work also involves curating, producing, mentoring and teaching. Joseph has convened FUTURERITUAL since 2017. As a facilitator, Joseph has co-led a number of expansive workshop projects, including FUTURERITUAL: MYTHIC TIME with VestAndPage, and The Sunday Skool for Misifts, Experimenters and Dissenters (VSSL studio). With Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph is the co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio and the co-director of ]performance s p a c e[.

https://josephmorganschofield.com 
@jmschofield


Soojin Chang

~ performance, sonic essay

Soojin Chang works in a process of trance, dissociation, feedback, and self-recognition to create performances that dissolve personhood and objecthood through animist methodologies. Their works take the form of video, live performance, ritual practice, and field research. Using her body as technology to transmute in/visibility, Chang’s practice negotiates contemporary ethics, colonial inheritance, and queer, interspecies reliance.

Current and recent interventions include: Dog Eggs at Asia Culture Center, Gwangju (2022); BXBY (2022) commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022; a heifer would be needed for the sacrifice at Tramway for Take Me Somewhere (2021); State of Possession at ICA London and CCA Glasgow (2019); Death Ritual at Sa Sa Art Projects, Phnom Penh (2019); and Hair Eggs at MoMA PS1 (2018).

https://soojinchang.com 


Rubiane Maia

~ performance, sonic essay

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian visual artist based between Folkestone, UK and Vitoria, Brazil. She completed a degree in Visual Arts and a Master degree in Institutional Psychology at Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil. Her artwork is an hybrid practice across performance, video, installation and writing, occasionally flirting with drawing, painting and collage. In 2016, she worked on the conceptual project titled 'Preparation for Aerial Exercise, the Desert and the Mountain' which required her to travel to high landscapes of Uyuni (Bolivia), Pico da Bandeira (Espírito Santo/Minas Gerais, BRA) and Monte Roraima (Roraima, BRA/Santa Helena de Uyarén, VEN). In the same year she completed her second short film titled ‘ÁDITO'. Since 2018 she has been working on the creation of an ongoing project called ‘Book-Performance’, composed by a series of actions devised in response to specific autobiographical texts particularly influenced by personal experiences of racism and misogyny. Currently, she is part of the international collective 'Speculative Landscapes' a group of four women which, since 2020, has been working on systemic questions about what else institutions can be, when shaped not from stories violence, segmentation and extractions in the territories.

https://rubianemaia.com
@rubianemaia_artwork


Teo Ala-Ruona

~ sonic essay

Teo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki based performance artist. Their work focuses on speculative and somatic fiction and body horror in forms of performances, texts and sound installations. They explore topics of sex, queer ecology, toxicity and gender, and look for ways to re-define language and narratives telling about pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth. By often using their own body as a site for various speculative stories to take place, they experiment on how through fiction they can transform themselves, as well as the perspectives from which others look at their body.

Ala-Ruona's work has recently been shown in Baltic Circle -festival (Helsinki), XS-festival (Turku), Nocturnal Unrest -festival (Frankfurt), Bangkok Biennial (Bangkok) and Gas-gallery and Human Resources (Los Angeles). They have graduated from MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance, at Helsinki Theatre Academy in 2018, and from MA in Art Education at Aalto University in 2016.

https://teoalaruona.net


Tiffany Auttrianna Ward

~ performance

Tiffany Auttrianna Ward is an independent curator, publisher, cultural producer and founder of Mare Residency. Ward has spent the last decade centering the stories of the African Diaspora through her academic and professional pursuits, which have taken her to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and throughout the continental United States. Additionally a multilingual writer, Ward has penned cultural commentary as a contributing writer for AFROPUNK, Sugarcane Magazine, and published a bilingual Portuguese and English online journal— Cores Brilhantes—a contemporary online space for Afro-Brazilian art from 2015-2018. She is a 2020 MFA Curatorial Practice graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She received her BA in History from Manhattanville College in 2011 with a focus on African Diasporic Studies. Recent awards include the Critical Minded Grant for Critics of Color, Leslie King Hammond Graduate Fellowship, MICA Intercultural Development Grant, MICA/MFA Graduate Merit Scholarship, and the MICA Graduate Research Development Grant.

@auttrianna

Future Ritual: Land, Art, Faith, Performance CIC

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