Marilyn Arsem CONSIDERING TIME

Intensive Workshop
Mon 17th - Fri 21st June, London


Workshop Fee: £150 (£110 concession)


Bodies in the Land6 day/59 hour durational performance by Marilyn Arsem. The Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas, USA. September 13-18, 2022. Photo by Jared Sorrells.



Our lives are ruled by time’s inevitable, relentless passage.  Always we have less of it than we had a moment ago. How do we move through time?  How does time move through us? What is its effect on the actions and body of the artist?  What is its impact on the audience?  How might we more consciously use time as an element in performance?



Nothing exists outside of time. Time operates on multiple scales simultaneously and is revealed through different manifestations.  Everything around us has a life of its own, sometimes considerably shorter than ours and sometimes much longer.

The presence of time becomes apparent through material and physical processes.   What happens when we allow processes to unfold in the time that they need?  What occurs when we impose different timeframes on them? Is it possible to control or manipulate time?  How does working with extended time alter the execution and implications of our actions?

This workshop examines the significance of time in live performance. We will explore a variety of ways in which we can use time as an active element in our work. Working with time, against time and through time, we will investigate how actions, sites, objects and ourselves are impacted and altered.  Serving as witnesses to each other’s work, we will also delve into the effects that playing with time has not only on ourselves as performers but on viewers as well.
 

Seven Disappearances, Durational performance by Marilyn Arsem. TIME SPACE BODY OBJECT – Part 4, Isles Art Initiative, Spectacle Island, Boston Harbor, MA, USA. August 1, 2015. Photo by Nabil Vega.

We ask audiences to spend their time with us.  What allows them to feel that it was worth giving a portion of their lives to the experience of the work?  It is important to know why you want the presence of a witness when you perform, and what you want from them.  What do you offer in return?

A significant component of the workshop will be private reflection and writing, as well as group discussions on questions related to the topic of time, not just in the context of creating performances but in our everyday lives as well.  We cannot separate our performance art from our daily life.  Our lives continue to proceed even as our performances unfold through time.



Participation



The Workshop 


This is an intensive, process driven workshop considering time, duration and their impact on material and physical processes.  

If you have questions around accessibility, please be in touch with Joseph (producing@futureritual.co.uk).

The workshop is for practicing artists of any level of experience who have an understanding or appreciation of durational methodologies, and who are ready to commit to a rigorous exploration of time.

The workshop is offered in English.

We will work every day from Monday 17th to Friday 21st June. We will meet at 10am on the first day and finish by 6pm on the final day.

Travel to and from the workshop, food and accommodation in London are the responsibility of the participants.

To Participate


The five day workshop is priced at £150 (£110 concession).

This is a subsidised price and all income goes towards the cost of putting the workshop on.

We are accepting a maximum of 16 participants on a rolling basis. We anticipate interest in the workshop will be high, so please be in touch soon. 

If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please complete this form, which asks for a brief statement outlining your interest in and experience of the workshop themes. If you would rather send a video or voice recording please note the link and any password in that same space. Please DO NOT send wetransfer or expiring download links.

A deposit of £50 will be requried to secure your place on the workshop, with the balance payable by May 15th.

> Expression of Interest Form



Marilyn Arsem

Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally.

Many of her works are durational in nature, minimal in actions and materials, and have been created in response to specific sites, engaging with the immediate landscape and materiality of the location, its history, use or politics. She incorporates a broad range of media, and often engages all the senses. Her performances are designed to implicate the audience directly in the concerns of the work, to create an experience that is both visceral and intellectual. Sites have included a former Cold War missile base in the United States, a 15th century Turkish bath in North Macedonia, an aluminum factory in Argentina, the grounds of an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium in Poland, the site of the Spanish landing in the Philippines, and an abandoned Russian mining outpost in the Arctic Circle.

Arsem is a member of Mobius Artists Group, an interdisciplinary collaborative of artists, which she founded in 1975. Arsem taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for 27 years, establishing one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art.

She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards and grants since the 1980s. She was awarded the 2015 Maud Morgan Prize from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for which she created 100 Ways to Consider Time.  The work consisted of 100 different six-hour performances by Arsem on the nature of time, performed in 100 consecutive days.

A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.

http://marilynarsem.net

Adrift, durational performance by Marilyn Arsem. First Biennial Festival of Performance Art and Sound, Contemporary Arts International, Acton, MA, USA. September 7, 2013. Photo by Chelsea Coon.


















 

Martin O’Brien’s DISCHARGE

Symposium & Performances
Saturday 2 March, Ugly Duck


> Tickets

Martin O’Brien, An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance), 2023. Photo by Zack Mennell.



Curated by artist Martin O'Brien and hosted by kink and fetish clubs in London, DISCHARGE was a notorious performance art event dedicated to presenting difficult, radical and marginalised performance work. DISCHARGE embraced the endless possibilities of the performance space for aesthetic, physical, and political art and experimentation.



Marking the end of a Martin’s project ‘An Eternity of Nothingness or The (Im)possibility of Living On’,  DISCHARGE returns with a special one-off event holding space to think about living and dying queerly.

The talks, conversations and performances reflect on sickness, sex, queerness, death, disability, mourning and (im)mortality.


> Book Tickets


If you face significant financial barriers, please email producing@futureritual.co.uk and we can arrange a reduced price or free ticket.

Martin O’Brien, Overture for the End (An Ashen Place), Whitechapel Gallery, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.


Programme



Full day pass // 14.00 to 22.30 // £16 / £20 / £25

Symposium

14.00 to 17.00

  • 14.00: arrivals & welcome
  • 14:15: An Eternity of Nothingess keynote by Martin O’Brien
  • 14:45: End(ing) Times panel with Kelechi Anucha, Patricia MacCormack, Sam McBean and chaired by Swati Arora
  • 15:45: Break
  • 16:00: Live Art, Dead Art panel with Anne Bean, Oreet Ashery, Rubiane Maia and chaired by Lois Keidan

Tickets: £8-£10

Performances

19.00 to 22.30

Performance art actions, sonic activations, dance and kinky goings on from: Anne Bean and Ansuman Biswas, Ash McNaughton, Electric Adam, Emilyn Claid, Maya Williams, Pianka Pärna and zack mennell. 

Tickets: £12/£15/£18


Artists & Contributors


Anne Bean

(panellist & performance)

In a monograph on her work, Self Etc., 2018, the writer Dominic Johnson wrote: Anne Bean is a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. The art of Anne Beanmakes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through soloand collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.

In 2022/23 she had work commissioned and shown at Turner Contemporary, Margate, the HattonGallery, Newcastle, Somerset House, the Whitechapel Gallery, Matt’s Gallery, Paris Photo, PhotoLondon, as well as a solo show with England & Co at Frieze Masters. In 2023 she wascommissioned to make a major work for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival In Search of theMiraculous, with a resulting exhibition at England & Co in London and Reflect, a lightwork, for Lumiere, Durham. She currently has work showing at Women in Revolt! Tate.

“Reading Anne Bean’s CV is like following a continuous performance, a continuous response to the world… a ‘magicification’ of the world. The panoply of places she has worked, times of the day ornight, interiors, exteriors, seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools, is astonishing: all shifting butall attuned to unique situations.”
Guy Brett, Autobituary (2006) Monograph produced for solo exhibition at Matt’s Gallery

www.annebeanarchive.com

Photo: A Transpective, Anne Bean, Queen Mary Jewish Cemetery, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

Ansuman Biswas

(performance)

Ansuman Biswas works in a wide variety of media, but his central concern lies between science, work and religion. He is interested in traversing, transposing and translating across many different kinds of border. To paraphrase the 13th Century Zen philosopher Dōgen: “Before my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams. During my search mountains are no longer mountains and streams are no longer streams. After my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams.”

www.ansuman.com

Photo: Ansuman Biswas, In Search of the Miraculous, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.

Ash McNaughton

(performance)

Ash McNaughton (b. 1990, Scotland) is an action-based artist currently situated in Folkestone, UK. Their practice is a process-led exploration of materials, gesture, movement, and sound. Site-responsive, durational and ritualisic in nature; Ash implements methods of endurance, repetition, and resistance to access altered states of being while reaching out into the spaces in-between. Their actions encourage a synergetic exchange between their physical, psychological and spiritual body and the environments they inhabit. This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us. A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.

Ash is an independent artist, producer, and project manager. They are co-organiser of SITE - a platfrom for collective site-responsive art interventions - and a member of the international Anam Cara Collective. They are associate director at ]performance s p a c e[ and in 2024 launched a new festival and platform for queer art and performance in Folkestone called Queer Call.

https://ashmcnaughton.com/

Photo:  ]performance s p a c e[, 2021. Photo by Manuel Vason.

Electric Adam

(performance)

Electric Adam is a London based artist, their practice combines sculpture, wearable art and installation for liveperformance. Adam creates wearable latex pieces and performs them as living sculpture. They seal themselfinside the airtight latex and using their breathing, pump the air out, slowly vacuum packing themself into asculptural form.Emerging from the London fetish scene, performing at parties and events such as Torture Garden, Adam’swork came to a wider audience in the live art world. They have performed and exhibited nationally andinternationally from the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Theatre Studio in London, to Cirque DuSoleil headquarters in Montreal and New Zealand's World of Wearable Arts Award show.Their work explores themes around fetish, sexuality and the body, influenced by religious imagery, ancientsculpture and a pop culture sci-fi aesthetic.

http://electricadam.com/

Photo courtesy of the artist.


emilyn claid

(performance)

emilyn claid’s career stretches back to the 1960s when she was a ballet dancer with the National Ballet of Canada and the 1970s when she was co-founder of experimental collective X6 Dance Space in London, a pioneering organisation for New Dance. In the 1980s she was artistic director of Extemporary Dance Theatre and in the 1990s choreographed for companies such as Phoenix and CandoCo. Working as an independent dance artist emilyn made and performed a series of iconic solo works in which she found an authentic voice as a lesbian-queer artist. emilyn is also an emeritus professor and a Gestalt psychotherapist and has recently published FALLING Through Dance and Life, (Bloomsbury 2021), a book that re- thinks Western culture’s physical, metaphorical, and psychological relationship to gravity. Working between live art and dance theatre, emilyn is currently touring a solo show ‘emilyn claid, UNTITLED’.

@emilynclaid

Photo by Henri T.


Kelechi Anucha

(panellist)

Kelechi Anucha is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University, having completed her PhD in English at the University of Exeter as part of the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times Project. Her doctoral project examined the temporalities of end of life writing, bringing together thinking from Black Studies, Disability Studies and Critical Medical Humanities. She is a member and co-lead within the Black Health and Humanities Network, a member of Mad Feeling Collective and co-convener of an online seminar series - Cultures of Madness. She is currently working on a project entitled ‘Madness in Black British Literature and Cultures: Genre and Counter-psychiatric frameworks’.

Photo by Genexus Photography.


Martin O’Brien

(keynote speaker)

Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. He was artist in residence at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles) in 2015. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2020, and the ICA (London) in 2021. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency.

@martinobrienart

Photo by Zack Mennell.



Maya Williams

(performance)

Maya Williams (they/them) is a contemporary dance artist. Their work is informed by Afro-Caribbean diasporic spirituality, the decriminalization of Sex Work and Queer cultural identity. Their practice includes contemporary erotic performance, release technique, pole dance and Turning Looks as a radical practice of gender non-comforing.

Maya has performed and curated creative events at Ovalhouse, The Barbican, Ugly Duck and Camden Roundhouse. With Fimbo Butures at Camden People’s Theatre, Vault Festival, The Place, Camden Roundhouse and Assembly Festival at Edinburgh Fringe. Under the name Heaven (she/her) they’ve performed at Sex Worker Pride 2023, The Kit Kat Club, The Windmill, The Gaslight and Sophisticats and share their visual art on Patreon.

IG: @High_Priestexx
Patreon: high-priestexx


Photo by Billy Nesbitt.



Oreet Ashery

(panellist)

Oreet Ashery is a visual artist who works across established art institutions and grassroots social contexts. Using film, photography, performance, image and textiles. Ashery narrates stories of precarious identities, featuring real life participants, combined with fiction. Ashery was awarded the 2017 Jarman Film Award for Revisiting Genesis (2016), a web series that questions how the boundaries between dying, care and self are affected by digital technologies. In 2020 they were a recipient of the Turner Prize Bursary for the exhibition Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery (2019), Wellcome Collection, London. Their monograph How We Die Is How We Live Only More So (2019) was published by Mousse.

Image: Selfish Road, video still, KW Institute for Contemporary Arts commission, 2022, courtesy of the artist and KW.


Patricia MacCormack

(panellist)

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art, occultism, and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her newest book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She recently completed a Leverhulme Fellow researching and developing Death Activism.

Image courtesy of the speaker.



Pianka Pärna

(performance)

Pianka Pärna is a queer non-binary performance artist working primarily in the medium of body-based practices. Born and raised in Estonia and trained as a professional ballet dancer for 7 years, Pianka explores their post-Soviet upbringing as the foundation of their practise through endurance, duration, repetition and ritual. To understand the complexities of being a post-Soviet body, they examine the interrelations between Baltic mythology, nostalgia, queerness, BDSM, and movement.
As a recent graduate from an MA at Queen Mary, Pianka continues researching the sociopolitical implications of the post-Soviet and the construction of home outside the bounds of the biological to re-envision collective queer livelihoods. Pianka’s works exert fear to activate queer futurities whilst confronting the various nostalgic narratives which emerge to consequently distort and subvert its perceptions. Altogether, the body harnesses its grief to reclaim agency and community-feeling in the spaces it continually inhabits.

www.piamperformance.co.uk @piankamperformance_

Image courtesy of the artist.



Rubiane Maia

(panellist)

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian transdisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, UK. Her work is a hybrid between performance, installation and other forms of expression, such as writing, photography, video and painting. In general, she is interested in the body, language, memory, phenomena and organic matter, being attracted by different states of perception and synergy through the relationships of interdependence and care between human and non-human beings, as minerals and plants. She often develops research in site specific contexts, always considering the elements, the landscape and the environment as guide and co-creators of her artworks.
In 2015, she took part at the exhibition 'Terra Comunal - Marina Abramovic + MAI', at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance ‘The Garden’. Currently, she is part of the 35th São Paulo Biennial 'Choreographies of the Impossible', 'Ana Mendieta: Silhouette in Fire | Terra abre caminhos' exhibition at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, and 'Fazer o Moderno, Construir o Contemporâneo: Rubem Valentim' exhibition, Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil.

www.rubianemaia.com/

Photo: The tongue bends whenever it faces what is unquestionable or what has been cursed, Book-Performance, Chapter VI, 2023, Photo by Bruno Makia.


Sam McBean

(panellist)

Sam McBean is Reader in Gender, Sexuality, and Contemporary Culture at Queen Mary University of London and co-chair of the Sexual Cultures Research Group. She is the author of Feminism’s Queer Temporalities (Routledge, 2016) and has published on feminist theory, queer theory, and contemporary literature and visual culture in journals including Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Contemporary Literature, and Feminist Media Studies. She is also a death doula and is currently working on an autoethnographic project, ‘Queer Death’, which explores end-of-life care, death, and loss from a queer perspective.


zack mennell

(performance)

zack mennell is an emerging, self-taught artist using writing, photography and performance to explore queerness and neurodiversity in relation to presence and visibility.  zack frequently collaborates with performance artist Martin O’Brien, notably in his recent works at Whitechapel Gallery as writer-in-residence, Sanctuary Ring (SPILL Festival, 2016) and The Last Breath Society (ICA, 2021). Other significant collaborations include those with Leon Clowes (ongoing), Baiba Sprance (2022), Kane Stonestreet & Phoebe Patey-Ferguson (ongoing), and  Joseph Morgan Schofield & Fenia Kotsopoulou (2019-2021). zack often works in documenting performance and live events through photography and writing - their photographic practice is strictly analogue, using 35mm film. They are a studio holder at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre and a member of the Metal New Artist Network and the Working Class Creatives Database.

www.zackmennell.com

Photo: zack mennell, (para)site, 2022. Photo by Milo Robinson for Thames Festival Trust.


Funders & Support


DISCHARGE is curated by Martin O'Brien and presented by Future Ritual in partnership with Ugly Duck. It is supported with public funds by Arts Council England.

Ugly Duck is a London based arts organisation that supports under-represented voices and emerging artists. Established in August 2012, their programme enables makers, community groups, professionals and the public to come together around unique cultural experiences and curated events. They have converted a beautiful empty Victorian warehouse in SE1 into a busy creative space which became, and still is, the home to countless rising artists. Recent events include Pretty Doomed, Otherness Archive, @Disturbance, Performance Space, Franko B (With A/Political), Shocked Quartz.

> www.uglyduck.org.uk
> @weareuglyduck















Joseph Morgan Schofield, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn, ICA 2022. Photo by zack mennell.




Future Ritual presents a collective performance 

A FELLING

Friday 12 April, Cardiff



A new collective performance initiated by Future Ritual, ‘A Felling’ explores ideas of death, remembrance, transformation, rebirth and the transferrance of energy between bodies and between the body and the environment.

Artists Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Marcel Sparmann co-create an immersive work, inviting audiences to step into a space of contemporary ritual, activated through intense embodied practices and characterised by expressions of compassion, vulnerability, strength and ethical exchange. Through this future ritual we may temporarily inhabit time in a different way, engaging in individual and collective experiences of processing and communion.

A Felling was first realised in November 2023 at IKLECTIK (London). Further performances will take place in Cardiff in April 2024 for Experimentica Festival. Schedule and tickets to be announced.



Ash McNaughton

Ash McNaughton (b. 1990, Scotland) is an action-based artist currently situated in Folkestone, UK. Their practice is a process-led exploration of materials, gesture, movement, and sound. Site-responsive, durational and ritualisic in nature; Ash implements methods of endurance, repetition, and resistance to access altered states of being while reaching out into the spaces in-between. Their actions encourage a synergetic exchange between their physical, psychological and spiritual body and the environments they inhabit. This practice is an attempt to articulate that which escapes us. A poetics of a fluid presence in a fixed world.

Ash is an independent artist, producer, and project manager. They are co-organiser of SITE - a platfrom for collective site-responsive art interventions - and a member of the international Anam Cara Collective. They are programmes manager at ]performance s p a c e[ and the Folkestone Local Associate Producer for New Queers on the Block.

https://ashmcnaughton.com/

Photo:  ]performance s p a c e[, 2021. Photo by Manuel Vason.


Joseph Morgan Schofield

Joseph Morgan Schofield (b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) uses performance, moving image, writing and curation to create future ritual. Joseph's queer ritual actions foreground desire, grief and wildness in the context of queer and ecological futurity; their acts of gathering and communion articulating a deep yearning - for both that which is lost, and that which is yet to arrive.

This ritual/performance/magic  is relational, emerging through encounters between their sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body and a host of agents - human and otherwise, including memory, geology, weather and myth.

Joseph has engaged with the South Pennine Moors as muse and collaborator for a number of years, and they 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.

They are the Creative Director of Future Ritual, a non-profit entity which holds their collaborative contributions to the emergence of new and more attuned cultures.

https://josephmorganschofield.com/

Photo:  Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), 2022. Photo by Zack Mennell.


Marcel Sparmann

Marcel Sparmann is a German visual artist, working in performance art, theatre, dance, public art and installation.

“I consider myself as visual based artist, experienced in theatre, dance, installation and performance art. Therefore my understanding and awareness of communication, exchanging and sharing is primarily image and action based. I'm cautious with verbalised language, but like to disintegrate the complexity of language, into poetic artistic expressions. The unfixed metaphors, the fluid mutations in the realm of deconstruction. Surrounded by visuals and their narratives, we think, speak and relate through images, identifying ourselves by codes and navigate them in cultural environments. Change is permanent. Therefore my practice follows the concept of fragility, expanding over various ideas of appearing and disappearing, traces and memories.

My artistic interest focuses on the creation of intense collective situations, compressed and formed in emotional and spiritual landscapes, in resistance. I'm interested in the exploration of a more profound understanding for compassion, kindness and bravery in the light of an unfolding vulnerability. I believe in space as an emotional and ritualistic environment and in the negotiation between the collective and common urgencies and their representations through out performance. A fertile way of manifesting the future. I’m searching for simplicity and actions which carry a pure aesthetic and oscillating temperature, maybe comparable with recent natural phenomenons.”

http://marcelsparmann.com/

Photo: Venice International Performance Art Week 2020. Photo by Fotini Kotsopoulou.


Funders and support


A Felling’ is initiated by  Future Ritual and commissioned by IKLECTIK.

The performance is co-created Ash McNaughton, Joseph Morgan Schofield and Marcel Sparmann.










An Eternity of Nothingness or The (Im)possibility of Living On

Martin O’Brien




Images: Martin O’Brien, An Ambulance to the Future  (The Second Chance), 2023. Stills from video. Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.




Many people who weren’t thinking about their bodies and the possibilities of illness and death are now forced to ... I think my work can offer a space for people to sit with images of death, and not in a morbid way. Those of us who have lived in zombie time know death in a different way, and now is a good time to open up the conversations around mortality through art.



Across 2023, Martin O’Brien was  ‘Writer in Residence’ at the Whitechapel Gallery. Martin’s work is continually exploring the politics of illness, death, and the undead. For this residency, Martin worked through writing and performance to consider ideas of immortality. He explored the ways in which writing and actions towards immortality might help to articulate something about death. Through his writings and performances during the residency, Martin explored spirits, ghosts, afterlives, undead creatures, cryonic preservation, rebirth, new lives, transformations and other fictional and imagined possibilities for immortality. Over the year, Martin created a collection of works in different mediums: performances, videos, short stories. The residency involved three live events and three published texts. Together they made up a series that playfully ask questions about the potential for immortality, and imagine a future without an eternity of nothingness.




Performance, Thursday 18th May

An Ambulance to the Future (The Second Chance)

The grim reaper stood there, finally I saw him. His skeletal form sparkled in the moonlight and nothing else existed. This was the deal. He reached out and wrapped his cold, bone hand around my skull. I was lost in the darkness of his cape. He drew me near and kissed me. He tasted like death, and I loved it.

Mixing video, live performance action and parables, this performance imagines a world in which immortality is possible. Drawing on stories of immortal people, it paints the picture of life lived over and over again, a life that doesn’t need water or oxygen, a life without the promise of an end point. It is a meditation on endings and new beginnings. With his usual intensity and wit, this work continues O’Brien’s explorations of the politics of death by asking what the idea of immortality can help us understood about being mortal.

> more info

Further performances of ‘An Ambulance to the Future’ were presented in Copenhagen as part of Managing Discomfort, a collaborative curatorial programme by Live Art Danmark, Toaster and Warehouse9.



Photo by zack mennell, 2023 




Performance, Saturday 22nd July

Overture For The End (An Ashen Place)


Bodies crawl through soot covered landscapes. A ghastly figure looms, unearthly sounds emanating from her mouth. A funeral procession for the living marches by, trumpets sounding, and the mourners weep but they don’t know why. A group of skeletal forms sit at a dining table as if awaiting a feast.

A spectacular exploration of death and immortality, Overture For The End (An Ashen Place) transforms the gallery into a place of decay, part hellscape, part apocalyptic landscape, filled with strange bodies performing deathly actions. The performance imagines repetitive cycles of life and death, an eternity of continuation with a promise of death that never arrives. Taking on the figure of banshee and crone, legendary Los Angeles artist Sheree Rose watches over the actions and intervenes in the cycles.

> more info





Photos by Fenia Kotsopoulou, Whitechapel Gallery, 2023

Performance, Thursday 14th December

Fading Out of Dead Air (Transmissions for the Necropolis)


A scratchy sound of white noise emanating from a small radio fills the dark room. A faint voice comes through. It sounds like nothing from this world, as if death itself was speaking.

Somewhere else, sickly patients lay in hospital beds in hell. They don’t understand why they are still sick. They listen to the hospital radio, but it doesn’t play their favourite songs. Instead, they listen to the sounds of a life once lived. 

Drawing inspiration from hospital radio and stories of ghosts heard through analogue technologies, the final instalment of Martin O’Brien’s performance trilogy explores the human desire to communicate, and record. In a strange and eerie landscape, O’Brien shuffles around, recording and playing half heard voices and unholy sounds.

The durational performance-installation is open throughout the day from 11am-9pm.

> more info

Photo by zack mennell, 2023.



Creative Engagement Project

The Last Breath Society


A series of gatherings exploring how performance art can be a way of processing mortality, illness, grief and loss. We are inviting queer people impacted by these conditions and experiences to join us in this process. Sessions will be held in person across the winter months in London.

> more info (deadline passed)

Martin O’Brien, The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin), 2021. Photo by Holly Revell.


Symposium & Performances

DISCHARGE


A one-off event of difficult, radical and marginalised performance work. Curated by artist Martin O'Brien, DISCHARGE embraces the endless possibilities of the performance space for aesthetic, physical, and political art and experimentation.

Saturday 24th Feb @ Ugly Duck
> more info 


Funders and Support
Commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery. Funded and supported by Arts Council England, the Leverhulme Trust, the Greater London Authority and Queen Mary University of London. Produced by FUTURERITUAL.

Credits
Lead artist ~ Martin O’Brien
Producer ~ FUTURE RITUAL
Project Coordinator ~ Zack Mennell
Project Assistant ~ Ewan Hindes
PR ~ Abstrakt

Videography ~ Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi












a participatory live art project about living and dying queerly

The Last Breath Society


(Applications Closed)


Photo by Holly Revell, 2021.



The Last Breath Society is a creative engagement project led by artist Martin O’Brien. The project explores how performance art can be a way of processing mortality, illness, grief and loss. We invite queer people impacted by these conditions and experiences to join us in this process. Sessions will be held in person across the winter months in London.


If what we are offering resonates with you and you feel able to commit to the process and our requests around care and responsibility, then there is information below on how to join the Last Breath Society.


Approach

Medicine is keeping me alive and it’s amazing, but I have to give full control to the doctors so I can continue living. Illness and its treatments strip you of agency and it feels like art is a place – maybe the only place – where you can regain agency over your body.”

Martin’s practice is concerned with death and dying, with what it means to be born with a life-shortening disease, and with the philosophical implications of living longer than expected.

Across the autumn and winter we will meet for four weekenders. At each, we will focus on different creative methodologies drawn from Martin’s practice to explore our experiences of mortality and grief. Currently, we are thinking of working through image making, writing, site-responsive and time-based practices.

As a participant, you will be guided through tasks and exercises by Martin and others, hear from artists and thinkers engaged in this work professionally, create and share your own work or creative responses, and have the option to exhibit something made during the process at a closing event.






Care

That so much of this legacy also carries the mark of trauma reminds us that live art, at it’s best, places itself on the frontline of life itself, where loss and death reveal themselves as the ground from which creativity and love grow.
Peggy Phelan, Live Art in LA

The deeply emotional nature of the topics we aim to explore means that personal and collective risk will be present during the process. While we welcome risk as a necessary condition of being alive, we ask potential participants to read this information fully and carefully consider if this process will be appropriate and beneficial to them at the current moment, and if they can in good faith commit to supporting their own wellbeing and that of the group.

As facilitators, we commit to leading the process with artistic and human compassion, but we cannot commit to offering psychological or other professional modes of care. While we will co-agree practices of accountability and care within the process, ultimately each person’s psychological wellbeing is their own responsibility.

The Last Breath Society should not be understood as a therapeutic process and those receiving therapeutic care should seek the advice of their therapist, doctor or counselor before applying.

The Last Breath Society should be understood as a primarily artistic and creative space, where we will explore what performance art can teach us about living, dying and grieving.

Prior to beginning the sessions, participants will be invited to complete a ‘Braver Spaces’ survey, helping us to understand how best to facilitate access and care in the process. In the first meeting, we will co-agree a set of working practices to support wellbeing. While we hope that everyone is able to stay the course, we understand that people may have to leave the process and this is OK.

Accessibility

The Last Breath Society will take place in wheelchair accessible spaces.

Information and discussion will be held primarily in spoken and written English.

We have a modest discretionary fund to support accessibility within the process. We will connect with participants around this in advance of the process.

Please email with further questions to producing@futureritual.co.uk



Facilitators

The project is facilitated by Martin O’Brien and Joseph Morgan Schofield. Guest facilitators will join the process.

Martin O’Brien is an artist and zombie. He works across performance, writing and video art. His work uses long durational actions, short speculative texts and critical rants, and performance processes in order to explore death and dying, what it means to be born with a life shortening disease, and the philosophical implications of living longer than expected. He has shown work throughout the UK; Europe; USA; and Canada, and is well known for his solo performances and collaborations with the legendary LA artist and dominatrix Sheree Rose. He was artist in residence at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles) in 2015. His most recent works were at Tate Britain in 2020, and the ICA (London) in 2021, and Whitechapel Gallery (London) in 2023. He is winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Visual and Performing Arts 2022. He is writer in residence at Whitechapel Gallery throughout 2023. Martin has cystic fibrosis and all of his work and writing draws upon this experience. In 2018, the book ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Art of Martin O’Brien’ was published by Live Art Development Agency. His work has been featured on BBC radio, The Guardian, and Sky Arts television. He received a PhD from the University of Reading in 2014. He is currently senior lecturer in Live Art at Queen Mary University of London.

Joseph Morgan Schofield is a curator, producer and maker. Through their company Future Ritual, Joseph works with artists to create contemporary expressions of ritual, in service of a new and more attuned culture. Future Ritual leads curatorial projects - most recently at the ICA (London) - and produces unique artistic projects - such as those by Anne Bean and Martin O’Brien - which explore belief, land, mystery and death. Joseph’s own artistic work is concerned mostly with bearing witness to loss though within this there is room for explorations of kinship, desire, eroticism and connection.



Joining the Last Breath Society

The Last Breath Society is open to queer people who consider themselves to have an active relationship to mortality, illness, loss or grief, and who are interested to explore performance art as a mode of ‘being with’ these experiences and conditions. Sessions will take place in person in London and we will give priority to people living in London to join.

The process is open to people who don’t consider themselves professional artists or creatives, as well as those who are exploring these themes professionally. You do not need to have experience of a performance art practice, but we ask that you approach the process with openness.

If you are interested in joining this process we ask that you:
  • read all the information on this page carefully and that you consider whether it would be beneficial and appropriate for you to join the process at this time.
  • commit to the published dates & published care information
  • research the facilitators and understand the nature of the practices we are interested in
  • complete this short form which asks about your reasons for wanting to join the process. There are written and spoken options for long form answers.

We anticipate that there will be strong interest in the process and we will not be able to offer a place to everyone who wants to join. In assembling the group we will prioritise those who articulate the clearest reasons for wanting to join this specific process.

(Applications closed)



Funders and Support
Funded and supported by Arts Council England, the Leverhulme Trust, the Mayor of London and Queen Mary University of London. Produced by FUTURE RITUAL.












Future Anatomy, VestAndPage, 2023. Still from video, courtesy of the artists.

Artist Lab with VestAndPage

Future Anatomies: 

Exquisite Corpse, Exalted Flesh

26th & 27th September, VSSL Studio

Please join FUTURE RITUAL for this two day lab facilitated by the artists VestAndPage considering artistic reimaginings of the body.

Sold Out


Received social and political understandings of the body are demonstrated, unceasingly, to be weird and obsolete. Though we remain committed to the immediacy and centrality of our sweating, sensate forms, we desire to imagine new anatomies, new functions, and new modes of embodiment.

We will watch, read and discuss the work of artists and thinkers engaged in similar lines of enquiry, develop our own texts and scores, and explore performative strategies for reimagining the flesh. Informed by queer theory, ritual practice, post human phenomenology and dis/ability arts, the lab is a space to think creatively and fluidly into these new possibilities.



Key Info


Tues 26th & Weds 27th September 2023, 11am - 5pm, 
VSSL Studio, Resolution Way, London, SE8 4AL

£30 (Concession) / £40 / £60 (Solidarity Ticket) 
> Sold Out

Deptford Railway station, served by Thameslink and National Rail, is a 1 minute walk from the studio. New Cross and New Cross Gate, served by the Overground and National Rail, are also within walking distance.

https://vssl-studio.org/

VestAndPage’s trip to the UK is supported by the Italian Cultural Institute.

Under Scars, VestAndPage, Venice International Performance Art Week, 2022. Photo by Lorenza Cini.


Accessibility


The studio is accessed via a raised, fenced path. Step free access can be found via the carpark on Tidemill Way.

The studio has a wide door. There is an accessible toilet within the studio block.

Please email producing@futureritual.co.uk with any queries.

About VestAndPage


Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke (b. 1981) and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes (b. 1962) have been working together as VestAndPage and gained international recognition in the fields of performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing, and with collective performance operas and temporary artistic community projects. Since over a decade, VestAndPage have been exploring performance art and film as phenomena through their collaborative creative practice, as well as through theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. Their works – a celebration of life – have been presented in museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas and a variety of sites worldwide. Their writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers.

VestAndPage's art practice is contextual and situation-responsive, conceived psycho-geographically in response to social contexts, natural surroundings, historical sites and architectures. In their works they move between the unseen and the unforeseen, the unsaid, the forgotten and the repressed. They inquire performance art as an urgency to explore the physical, mental and spiritual bodies, where moments of crisis or extreme situations often see the crossing of boundaries by the break with norms and known orders, to interface with the ephemeral matter of art and existence.

On December 2012, VestAndPage conceived and initiated the live art exhibition project VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK. Between 2012 and 2016, the project showcased in the Trilogy of the Body historic pioneer works on exhibit in conjunction with live programs of durational performances, presenting over 120 international artists and an ongoing educational program. Since 2017, the project presents in the new format Co-Creation Live Factory an international educational platform with residential and collaborative nature.

Besides sharing their pedagogy on collaborative performance making in intensive workshops and co-creation classes. Since 2019, they are tutoring guest artists at the Master of Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts, since 2020 at MA Performance at the Norwegian Theatre Academy.

https://www.vest-and-page.de













In Search of the Miraculous

Curated and convened by Anne Bean
Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2023
Anne Bean, Drop and Flame, 1990


The village of Walsingham in North Norfolk, known for a miraculous happening, provides a unique context for artists. Across the Spring Bank Holiday works of painting, moving image, installation and sculpture will appeared at sites in the village. Seekers and curious folk were invited to join us as ‘pilgrims’ led through Walsingham, encountering performances, actions and demonstrations. This special event sought to create a basis for shared dialogue, conviviality and reflection ‘in search of the miraculous.’


The event and exhibition featured works and offerings by Anne Bean, Anna Brass, Ansuman Biswas, selina bonelli, Oona Grimes, Poppy Jackson, Joan Key, Scilla Landale, Helen McIlldowie-Jenkins, Reverend Gyoro Nagase, Holly Slingsby, Filipos Tsitsopoulos, Candide Turner Bridger and Richard Wilson RA. Further information on participating artists and their work can be found below.

Ansuman Biswas, Before, During, After, 2023. Photo by Fenia Kotsopoulou.



Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi, 2023.




Oona Grimes, Wool and Water, 2023. Still from video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Joining the pilgrimage

Our day-long pilgrimage ‘in search of the miraculous’ took place on Saturday 27th May. We met roadside, by the 14th century Slipper Chapel, located within the Catholic National Shrine and Basilica of Our Lady.

We embarked on the Pilgrim Way, a one mile path between the Shrine and the village of Walsingham, led by Reverend Gyoro Nagase and his walking drum. Along the way we encountered performances by Holly Slingsby, selina bonelli and Poppy Jackson.

Arriving at the end of the Pilgrim Way to St Seraphim’s Chapel, an Orthodox chapel housed in an old railway cottage, we explored the works of painting, ceramics, installation and moving image by Anne Bean, Anna Brass, Candide Turner Bridger, Joan Key, Filipos Tsitsopoulos and Richard Wilson. These were to be found in Walsingham’s religious and civic spaces, as well as in the windows of houses and shops in the village.

Refreshments were available from St Seraphim’s beutiful Quiet Garden, in which ‘pilgrims’ also found a performance by Ansuman Biswas and a demonstration of Icon Painting by Elenis Icons. St Serpahim’s Icon Gallery will be open, alongside an installation in the Chapel.

We reconvened at the Parish Hall for ‘The Miraculous Story of Walsingham Seen Through Glass’, a talk by Scilla Landale, and films by Oona Grimes and Anne Bean. From 6.30pm there was  food, drink and conviviality in the Parish Hall. Some aspects of the programme remained open acoss the weekend.

Closing Event

We held a reflective closing event, hosted by England & Co at Sotheran Building in London, on Thursday 7th September. The documentation by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi was shown alongside films by Anne Bean and Oona Grimes, and further works by Joan Key and Richard Wilson.



Credits

‘In Search of the Miraculous’ is convened and curated by Anne Bean. The project is produced by FUTURE RITUAL, and funded and supported by Arts Council England, East Anglia Art Fund, Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Norfolk County Council.

> annebeanarchive.com
> eastangliaartfund.org.uk
> nnfestival.org.uk


Image: Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud, Anna Brass, 2022. Still from video. Image courtesy of the artist.



Bios and Works


In Search of the Miraculous -

Anne Bean 


In 1973, Anne Bean cut through the book 'In Search of the Miraculous,' by the philosopher, P.D. Ouspensky who was writing on the early teachings of the seeker George Gurdjieff. This rectangular void that she created inside the covers, allowed one to peer through the entire book to see two halves of a photo that she had glued in, as though looking at both ends of a tunnel simultaneously. That photo related to her thesis 'what is art and what am I doing in it?' Ouspensky wrote: "the undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us. The ’miraculous’ was a penetration into this unknown reality.” Fifty years after the original intervention with the book, Anne Bean's film and action 'In Search of the Miraculous,' probes this penetration

Her ceramics, 'the visionaries', shown in the window of 'Read and Digest Tearoom', partly arose from seeing a small bust of a three horned Roman deity, found at the Walsingham Roman temple site.  This deity’s horns brought to her mind the notion of antennae reaching backwards and forwards, probing the world, whilst concurrently emitting ideas and visions into it. The horns also strongly suggested the jester, a word derived from the Anglo-Norman word 'storyteller.'  The jester could tell the truth that could not otherwise be told. The Pilgrim badges, available for this pilgrimage, are based on this Roman deity.


Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud - Anna Brass

Anna Brass is an artist and filmmaker based in Norwich. Set in late medieval Italy and Essex, Brass’ short film explores earthly bodies and celestial realms. Brass draws on a diverse imagery to depict a world populated with strange objects: an oversized pilgrim badge, talking maiolica pots, and a dazzle camouflaged cathedral. Shot on 16mm with a cast of non-actors, the film presents a rich series of tableaux dense with the artist’s sculptures, backdrops and makeshift constructions. ‘Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud’ is supported by Stuart Croft Foundation.


Before, During, After - Ansuman Biswas

Ansuman Biswas works in a wide variety of media, but his central concern lies between science, work and religion. He is interested in traversing, transposing and translating across many different kinds of border. To paraphrase the 13th Century Zen philosopher Dōgen: “Before my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams. During my search mountains are no longer mountains and streams are no longer streams. After my search mountains are mountains and streams are streams.”

Biswas’ performance “Before, During, After” reflects on Spiritual Materialism within practices of pilgrimage and on the search for the miraculous as a kind of yearning for something out of the ordinary, something more than mundane.

"They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it. But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.”
George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan (1923)


covered, dys-covered, re-covered :: a process of gaps and revelations - selina bonelli

selina is currently exploring abandoned post-conflict architecture through performance and sound. they hope to develop an affective trail of embodied witnessing of marginalized voices through the borders drawn into the landscape around these structures. they seek to explore the spaces outside of language by expanding on a listening through what touch could be to uncover the resonances trapped in ruins, utterances and hauntings.

"i will not have the words for a type of loss that is so distant it is intimate."
ALOK, funeral in Femme in Public (2017)


Wool and Water - Oona Grimes

Oona Grimes is a London based artist, primarily a chaser of language through drawing, clay making & film. During Grimes’ 2018 Bridget Riley Fellowship at The British School at Rome she segued from thieving Lorenzetti tartans and cartoon detail from Etruscan paintings, to the appropriation of neorealist films - mis-remembered, imitated and low tech re- enacted: a physical drawing of herself captured on i-phone.

Grimes’ interest in the The Miraculous stems from a love of medieval manuscripts and early Italian votives, depicting the supranatural in the everyday.

“Wool & Water” is a Norfolk Miracle which introduces Lewis Carroll to Pasolini. The Sheep (a metamorphoses of the White Queen from 'Through the Looking Glass’) undertakes a quest for transformation and is finally granted sainthood.


Holy Marys - Poppy Jackson

Born in Norfolk, Poppy Jackson views performance as a potential entranceway to the transformative, divine, or miraculous. Through use of creative intent in sacred site, the artist works with ritual action, charged material, duration as a means towards altered states of consciousness, and pilgrims, artists and audience as witness and collective energy.

The native ladybirds of this performance have been raised by the artist from young larvae. In becoming an abject female body through their interaction today; the work addresses Christianity’s complex views of, discomfort at, and influence upon the mother’s body. These are exemplified by the paradoxical figure of The Virgin Mary - a traditional mother figure sinless of sexual experience.

Ladybirds were named after the Virgin Mary in Medieval times when farmers prayed to Her to save their failing crops and ladybirds miraculously saved the fields from pests. In early religious paintings, Mary was often shown wearing a red cloak; the spots of the seven spot ladybird were said to symbolise Her seven joys and seven sorrows. Worldwide, cultures attribute ladybirds with luck, connection to the divine, protection of faith, and as a bringer of gifts, messages or even children (being called ‘little midwife' (commaruccia) in some regions of Italy). In Christianity they are symbolic of the soul of Our Lady, standing for the Virgin Mary’s selfless compassion and sacrifice, and act as a mediator between earth and heaven, carrying prayers to the skies.

This mother’s body, barefoot along the ‘flight path’ of the Pilgrims Way, presents to us ladybirds’ cultural stand as a visual totem for the efficacy of prayer and connection to larger forces. ‘Marys’ encompasses the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, and also refers to the artist's matriarchal lineage through her Irish Catholic Grandmother, Mary Hennessy, who survived Tuberculosis and gave Poppy and her mother their middle names of Mary. The work takes inspiration from the performativity of intent of the walkers of this ancient path at the site of a Mother Mary Miracle, whose footsteps span centuries of searching for the miraculous.


16 Small Shrines - Joan Key

At first there was an interest in exploring the colours of red paint. This produced an association with Pompeian painting in which figures, now on the verge of ruin, can hold a cool presence, both mythic and fragile. That fleeting sensation of figural movement was more important than narrative recognition. It belongs to deep roots: what Abe Warburg refers to as ‘the fossil impressions of ancient energies’.*

In the studio, the cardboard shrines emerged during lockdown, which created enormous amounts of packaging for dispatch. Card was folded to protect contents, but once un-folded its shape was reminiscent of icons or altar pieces and their protective apotraic usage.  The red is a Cadmium Burgundy, an expensive colour which, in association with Golden Ochre, holds associations with value. The thin watercolour paint surface suggested the opposite: povera, associated with the cardboard’s loss of contents and destroyed forms.

The miraculous potential of the shrine’s iconic usage can be productive in the understanding of narratives: secular or sacred. The association with prayer and rituals that protect or bring hope, health and prosperity, may be magnificent but similar qualities may also be found in the road-side shrines or votive offerings to household shrines for small.

There is a memory attached to making these works, of visiting a tiny Orthodox church in a remote Greek village. The iconostasis contained icons of various styles and dates, but there were many humble additions of printed cardboard icons, some quite modern, some dating from the nineteenth century. These could be faded or damaged by dust and damp, but nevertheless their sense of worth, as signs of attachment, remained. Permitted to have a place, humble images elevated by their setting and the hope they might literally bless, cure or remember their patrons, and those who worshipped in this remote place.

Joan Key, London, August 2022 *Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Surviving Image, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017, p.218


The Miraculous Story of Walsingham Seen Through Glass - Scilla Landale

Scilla Landale started guided running guided tours of Walsingham over 35 years ago. Scilla will offer a special presentation entitled “The Miraculous Story of Walsingham Seen Through Glass”. This talk will contextualise “In Search of the Miraculous” within the broader religious and historical context of Walsingham. Additionally, Scilla’s tours of Walsingham may be joined on Friday 26th May. (see above for details).


Icon Painting Demonstration - Helen McIlldowie-Jenkins

Helen McIldowie-Jenkins is an artist, iconographer and Secular Franciscan (OFS) who has undertaken numerous fine art and icon commissions since the early 1990s.

Commissioning bodies include Bristol Cathedral, Chelmsford Cathedral, Wymondham Abbey, The English College Rome, The Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, The Turf Club Pall Mall, St Mary's Harrow on the Hill, Holy Trinity Cuckfield, All Hallows Gospel Oak, The Oratory of Cardiff University Chaplaincy and several chapels of the Woodard School Corporation. Helen has also produced numerous bespoke commissions for private clients in the UK, USA and Australia.

Helen has given interviews to BBC radio and talks to conferences and groups. Her research into 13th century crucifixion iconography has also been cited in art historical papers.

Helen only uses the traditional medieval panel painting techniques of egg tempera and water gilding to compose original devotional art as well as archetypal Byzantine Greek and Russians icons. Her work also references early Franciscan and Italian 14th century Trecento painting.

Helen also has a passion for Clerical Portraiture and has recently painted His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols and Canon Bruce Ruddock of Chichester Cathedral.



Pilgrimage - Reverend Gyoro Nagase 

Reverend Gyoro Nagase first arrived in England in 1978 from Aichi prefecture, near Nagoya, in Japan, to assist in the construction of the first Peace Pagoda in the UK in Milton Keynes. In 1984 he moved to London, to construct the Peace Pagoda in Battersea park, which was completed the following year. Reverend Nagase makes pilgrimages to and from areas of social and political significance to promote peace, with just a begging bowl and a walking drum. Pilgrimages have included Brantwood (John Ruskin’s home), Coniston, Cumbria to London Peace Pagoda, Battersea Park, from Vienna Peace Pagoda to Oświęcim, (Auschwitz), from Ukraine to Russia to visit and pray at Chernobyl, and walk from Kiev to Yasnaya Polyana (Leo Tolstoy’s home).


Messenger’s Lament- Holly Slingsby

Holly Slingsby is a visual artist working in performance, video and painting. She studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University; and the Slade School of Art, London. Her visual language reflects a fascination with iconographic traditions, drawing on Biblical imagery, mythologies, and contemporary culture. Much of her recent work seeks to convey the often unspoken experience of infertility.

Slingsby’s work has been shown at Turner Contemporary, Margate; Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani, Girona; Tintype, London; DKUK, London; Matt’s Gallery; Spike Island; Modern Art Oxford; Freud Museum, London; CCC Barcelona; LABS Bologna; ICA, London; FEM Festival, Girona; Art Licks Weekend, London; and Barbican, London.



Dreams and nightmares made of sound and fury - Filippos Tsitsopoulos

Lady Macbeth, whose shadow precedes her down the castle stairs as she sleepwalks toward insanity, meets its male personage, Macbeth in a deluge of genre and symbolism of a Heideggerian dasein. He/She/Them is rubbing her/his/ their hands together in a famous line of regret: “Out, damned spot!” Her staff overhears this murder confession before both are returning upstairs with the chillingly fatalistic line: “What’s done can not be undone. To bed.” To dream no more.

And what if a dream can heal the myth? Macbeth plays a silent piano in the broken carcases of the airplane wings.

The riddle of Shakespeare in search for the miracle.

Filippos is using extraordinary and elaborately constructed masks as a form of protec- tion, disguise, identity, isolation, alienation, and human resilience. His work involves an exploration of authentic identity versus performed identity. He considers the often polarised fragmented identities that we perform and how to bring the interiorised au- thentic self and the exterior constructed self together. His goal is to examine socially constructed patterns of behaviour, create situations in which the participants break or transcend the internal feedback loops that control their own actions, and address the power structures we inhabit and perpetrate.



Talismans - Candide Turner Bridger

Candide Turner Bridger is an ecoartist and pigment maker, based in Walsingham. She works with the earth in site specific projects, using the soil to make rich and colourful pigments. Her work questions our relationship to nature by exploring symbols and patterns within.  

Candide researches the history and folk tales from a site she has taken the soil to make pigment from and holds workshops where the audience are encouraged to create a dialogue around our history with nature, and the importance of ecological and social justice. Her aim is to inspire care and respect for the world we live in.

Ecoart is grounded in ecological ethics; it encompasses the physical, biological, cultural, political and historical aspects of ecosystems.



Warship - Worship - Richard Wilson RA

Richard Wilson’s interventions in architectural space draw heavily for their inspiration from the worlds of engineering and construction.

The ship (bark or barque, barchetta) was an ancient Christian symbol. It is the Church tossed on the sea of disbelief, worldliness, and persecution but finally reaching safe harbour with its cargo of human souls. “A ship carries the body and the church carries the soul”

It was also a great symbol during times when Christians needed to disguise the cross, since the ship’s mast forms a cross in many of its depictions. The term nave is from navis, the Latin word for ship, an early Christian symbol of the Church as a whole, with a possible connection to the Ship of St. Peter or the Ark of Noah. The term may also have been suggested by the keel shape of the vaulting of a church. In many Nordic and Baltic countries a model ship is commonly found hanging in the nave of a church, and in some languages the same word means both “nave” and “ship”.















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
















Performance

3 Reflections²


Benjamin Sebastian


Wednesday 18 May 2022
> info & tickets


Benjamin Sebastian, 3 Reflections², 2022. Photograph by Zack Mennell.



“This work seeps slowly, requesting patience, reflection, vision & vulnerability from both you and I.

Repetitive actions loop on themselves again and again. Across three hours; three full cycles will be completed.

Voice, light, language, adornment and a breaking of the skin; will be used in an attempt to temporarily bridge interiority and exteriority, the proximate and distant - the past, present & future.

Alone, together.

ɿoɿɿim ɿυoγ mɒ I”


The work will unfold across three hours, with Sebastian moving between three work stations every 20 minutes. Audience members are free to come and go as they please, while the piece loops and builds during this time.

www.benjamin-sebastian.com 
@benjaminsebastian



Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.


Photos by Zack Mennell.








Performance

Heavenly Shower of Bank Notes


Soojin Chang


Saturday 21 May 2022
> info & tickets

Soojin Chang, 2022. Photos by Zack Mennell.


What will you do with your vision of her?


Heavenly Shower of Banknotes is a space for gambling desire and testing sight. Soojin Chang invites the audience to offer her fate as she is bound to another in a room. Georgie (Rei-n) Lo performs as mediator in this experimental ritual as it oscillates between a fighting ring, feast, and transaction. Come and join the match.


www.soojinchang.com


Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.







Joseph Morgan Schofield, 2022. Photo by Zack Mennell.

Performance

with bare feet touching the sky I yearn


Joseph Morgan Schofield


Thursday 26 May 2022
> info & tickets


Underpinned by a deep sense of longing that is about both loss and desire, with bare feet touching the sky I yearn calls to a trans* futurity which is wilder and more raw than the anxious, ossifying present. This futurity is multiplicitous - shrouded, erotic, and non-linear. It is bound up with more-than-human ecologies and, like life itself, it is chaotic and non-binary.


Prophetic fictions compost with dried flowers, soil and natural pigments; a wormhole is opened in the earth and the boundaries between human subjectivity and the worlds beyond are made porous; sweaty, bloody gestural embodiments of yearning and rudimentary chroma-keying facilitates a symbolic, DIY diffusion of selfhood; and the poetic resonances of texts, movements, materials and actions are offered to those gathered as a divinatory device. The work offers no clear path but rather an invitation - to step into a more mythic time, a space for dreaming, grieving, desiring and communing.



www.josephmorganschofield.com 
@jmschofield

Videography and editing by Baiba Sprance and Marco Beradi.
Photos by Zack Mennell







Performance

Every Time I Trace The Horizon, My Hands Catch Fire

[Book-Performance, Chapter III]


Rubiane Maia


Sunday 29 May 2022
> info & tickets

Rubaine Maia, 2022. Photo by Zack Mennell.


“From January 2018 to January 2019, I made a commitment to write every day. I simply created the exercise of sitting at the computer and writing whatever came to mind, purposely without setting a specific direction. I was influenced by both the 'Automatic Writing' method used by surrealist poets to subvert the conscious mind and by the 'Psychography' a practice initiated by Allan Kardec. Through this process, a series of cathartic writings emerged. Mostly narratives that start from my own daily life connecting layers of traumatic memories buried in oblivion. Situations that reveal the violence and brutality of a system that silences and alienates minority identities: in my case, a Latin American, mother and black female artist.


As I am very interested in the resonances that memory has on our behaviour and ways of existing, I started developing an ongoing project of live performances called Book Performance, in which I review these writings and transform them into symbolic actions to be presented in public.”


This iteration of Rubiane’s Book Performance is made in collaboration with Tiffany Auttrianna Ward.

www.rubianemaia.com 
@rubianemaia_artwork










Mythic Time



A residential workshop exploring the (re-)invention of spiritual practices, the sacred, rites and rituals through performance art.



Photos by Zack Mennell.

The here-and-now is insufficient. The fog of the capitalist deadland is ossifying. We demand something more. Faced with distance, anxiety and exile, belonging feels mythic. FUTURERITUAL asks: how can the 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?

Breaking with the here-and-now necessitates a series of temporal maneuvers. Ritual is an apt symbolic technology for this, for ritual is a way of entering time and rendering it habitable through communion.

Performance art is a potent modality of ritual, for, within performance art, time operates as material. Rites and rituals involve, typically, a series of practices based on images, words, actions, objects, symbols organised in a performative act. They produce resonance and relations. They cultivate the practice of attention. Live Art and performance art practices have been informed on an essential level by ritual practice, and attention to ritual reveals art as a way of holding that which is magic and sacred.

Inside this workshop, we hope to produce a temporary ritual community within which we may explore the (re-)invention of spiritual practices, rites and rituals through performance art.

What is the place of ritual with contemporary performance culture? What happens when we inhabit liminal spaces and thin places through performance? What possibilities do art and ritual hold for remaking ourselves and our world?


We will begin by engaging with our own identity, desire, memory, history and artistic urgency and use these in the expansion of our own artistic ritual practices. We are particularly interested in the processual and transformative qualities of ritual performance - how they may destabilise the normative order, and how they may become the source of our creative acts.

We will undertake a variety of exercises, tasks, performance jams and discussions, involving both solo and communal exploration. We will be responsive to the locality of ]performance s p a c e[ and the Kent coast, working indoors and outdoors, and at different times of the day and night. We will work towards the realisation of a public sharing on the final night. After that we will re-unite for discussion to understand what we have performed and the possibilities contained within it.

Folkestone, 20th - 25th September 2021. The workshop was supported by ]performance s p a c e[ and the Live Art Development Agency.

some notes on space

As this is an in-person workshop, the number of participants will be limited, and we will work together to set and maintain clear boundaries in view of the pandemic at the beginning of the workshop.

In co-creating this space, we are committed to the principles of ‘braver space’, where difference is acknowledged, where physical and emotional boundaries are respected, where care and inclusion are centred, and where accountability is practiced. We will discuss this further in advance of, and during, the workshop. 

It is important to note that, all too frequently, colonial processes acts of cultural appropriation and vandalism have been practiced within art making. This has been particularly visible in practices where art meets ritual. It has often seemed easy, convenient or acceptable for white artists to fetishise, romanticise and universalise the specific cultural practices or traditions of indigenous people and people of colour. These processes uphold white supremacy. In the curation of other white artists in this workshop space, FUTURERITUAL and VestAndPage seek to amplify the voices of those who engage ethically with these issues, who think critically about their desires and histories, and whose work resists, opposes, or plots an escapes from the capitalist colonial cis-tem.





about the facilitators

VestAndPage

Since 2006, German artist Verena Stenke (b. 1981) and Venetian-born artist and writer Andrea Pagnes (b. 1962) have been working together as VestAndPage and gained international recognition in the fields of performance art, performance-based film, writing, publishing, and with collective performance operas and temporary artistic community projects. Since over a decade, VestAndPage have been exploring performance art and film as phenomena through their collaborative creative practice, as well as through theoretical artistic research and curatorial projects. Their works – a celebration of life – have been presented in museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas and a variety of sites worldwide. Their writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers.

VestAndPage's art practice is contextual and situation-responsive, conceived psycho-geographically in response to social contexts, natural surroundings, historical sites and architectures. In their works they move between the unseen and the unforeseen, the unsaid, the forgotten and the repressed. They inquire performance art as an urgency to explore the physical, mental and spiritual bodies, where moments of crisis or extreme situations often see the crossing of boundaries by the break with norms and known orders, to interface with the ephemeral matter of art and existence.

On December 2012, VestAndPage conceived and initiated the live art exhibition project VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK. Between 2012 and 2016, the project showcased in the Trilogy of the Body historic pioneer works on exhibit in conjunction with live programs of durational performances, presenting over 120 international artists and an ongoing educational program. Since 2017, the project presents in the new format Co-Creation Live Factory an international educational platform with residential and collaborative nature.

Besides sharing their pedagogy on collaborative performance making in intensive workshops and co-creation classes. Since 2019, they are tutoring guest artists at the Master of Performance Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts, since 2020 at MA Performance at the Norwegian Theatre Academy.

https://www.vest-and-page.de

Joseph Morgan Schofield

Joseph Morgan Schofield (b. 1993, Rochdale, UK) is an artist working with performance, moving image and expanded forms of writing. Articulating their practice as ‘queer ritual action’, their work is broadly concerned with desire, particularly in relation to ecology and queer futurity. This queer ritual action foregrounds the immediacy of the sweating, wanting, sensate non-binary body. Understanding art-making as a technology of divination, they consider their work to be a tool for the creation of contemporary myth; a site for the work of mourning, yearning, processing and communing.

Understanding acts of gathering and communing as central to their practice, Joseph’s work incorporates curating, producing, facilitating, mentoring and teaching. Joseph organises FUTURERITUAL, a performance and research project considering ritual and queer futurity, and is the co-founder and facilitator of The Sunday Skool for Misfits, Exprimenters and Dissenters, with Martin O’Brien and Shabnam Shabazi.

With Benjamin Sebastian, Joseph is the co-founder and co-director of VSSL studio (London, UK) and the assistant director of ]performance s p a c e[ (Folkestone, UK). Joseph is a member of Chisenhale Dance Space (London, UK) and of the Anam Cara collective (International), and they are a frequent collaborator of Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy). 

https://www.josephmorganschofield.com



LADA


Screenings, Tuesday 24 September 2019

An evening of artist films, performance to camera and archival documentation by artists thinking through ritual, performance and queer futurity. The evening featured works by Jon John, Martin O’Brien and Sheree Rose, and Nwando Ebizie.



Nwando Ebizie

Nwando Ebizie is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose work converges around immersive installation, performance art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritual. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception (inspired by her own neurodiversity) and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice.

http://nwandoebizie.com

Martin O’Brien and Sheree Rose

Martin O’Brien’s work draws upon his experience of suffering from cystic fibrosis. His performance and video art is concerned with physical endurance, disgust long durations and pain base practices in order to address a politics of the sick, queer body and examine what it means to be born with a life-threatening disease, politically and philosophically.

Sheree Rose is an American photographer and performance artist. Her photographs documented the BDSM and queer subcultures in Los Angeles during the early 1980s. With her partner and creative collaborator, performance artist Bob Flanagan, they explored sexuality, BDSM, death, and daily living with terminal illness.

https://martinobrienart.com

Jon John

In his performances, Jon John (1983 - 2017) incorporated references to high fashion, pop music, so-called ‘modern primitivism’ and industrial culture, magic, sadomasochism, and sex. Including uniquely sentimental uses of bloodletting, hook suspensions, dancing on thorns, and DIY surgery, Jon John’s own tattooed, scarred and ‘hacked’ body was central to his work as an artist.





A conversation with Martin O’Brien and Nwando Ebizie followed the screening, chaired by Joseph Morgan Schofield. 



Kunstraum


performances, Thursday 26 September 2019

An evening of performances by Charlie Ashwell, Sandra Stanionyte and Kelvin Atmadibrata.


Spectral formations + gatherings/convenings

commissioned response by Sara Sassanelli

Recently I have been interested in the repurposing of objects + sound. Mainly by listening to ASMR, but also through electronic music. The repurposing of half-recognisable samples as a cartographic or architectural exercise. Music that allows me to delve into the spectrality of its sound - struggling through the possibility of constantly evolving layers. Sound that holds subterranean memory.

Charlie Ashwell’s provocation with spells is a direct one. How can poetry - or spells - or ritual practices - be harnessed as technology to propel beyond capitalist desires? The rules are clear: cards delineate the space, a circle; audience sits outside; performers inside. The cards are signifiers that trigger previously arranged poems, spells and political desires. There’s a stack of cards that identically match the circle and Charlie and Es take it in turns to draw a card each. Once the card has been drawn they read out the the triggered poem/spell/political desire and then choose a time frame to dance within. The process becomes alchemy, a manifestation of the poetics of movement, the collapse of time and the inability to harness a stable vision of the future. It’s in this slippage, or instability that I think I am witnessing something clearly. A temporal disjunction where poetic assertion, spell casting and repurposing of sound, movement and divination create a space-time continuum of queer desire. Every round of selection, reading and action becomes a different splintering insight into generative possibility. I get embarrassed in the moment, by my own desire to feel moved by the actions, but then I am moved. Or shifted away from the energy I came in with.

Spectrality became recurring - through spectral architectures and ghost-figures. A solid block of flour looks like transmutation. It becomes concrete, or a flat rock formation, or wooden plank. It creates affect that dissolves and reforms as I watch. Sandra Stanionyte’s intention fills the room, but sometimes breaks as flour dissolves and moves. The body then breaks the architecture. Sandra falls into the solid block, which disintegrates in a way that I can only describe as lowkey. Not soft or subtle, but self-aware and unbothered by the dust it creates in room. Pinning dress to shoulders, the gap between the body and the dress becomes a precarious architecture. A dress is placed on a hanger which is wedged between one of the windows of the room. My desire was to focus on its measurements, the micro relationship between the edges of the hanger and the wall become the most interesting thing, shattered by the weight of the hanger.

Spectral appearances of memories that are not mine appear in Kelvin Atmadibrata’s work. The ghost of a weight, that is actually replaced by an empty white object. The absence of sound, which I think is only due to my attention being so focused on the rings holding the spectral weight. I think I missed the sound, and am now imagining a low drone, that intensifies as I watch. I’m imagining the different possible transmutations of the objects. Weight, metal loops, concrete floor, a different kind of alchemy to the first one occurs. A symbolic alchemy where each object or state of being relies on the next in order to create a whole, or a half-whole (a momentary whole). As everything dissolved, I am reminded of the work required in filling in the gaps + the pleasure of gaps in the first place.



Charlie Ashwell with Es Morgan, spells, Kunstraum, 2019. Photo by Jemima Yong.

Charlie Ashwell is a dance artist working with choreography, writing and dramaturgy. 


Charlie’s practice explores the tensions, ironies and possibilities of witchcraft, bringing it into contact with experimental dancing and feminist politics. Recent solo Banishing Dance was performed at Space Studios, Hackney, as part of FUTURERITUAL, and Wellcome Collection as part of SPLAYED Festival, in partnership with The Place. spells is a new research project in collaboration with queer dance and performance artist Es Morgan, building on their mutual interest in tarot reading, spell-casting, poetry and choreographic scores.

spells is an experiment in the technical potential of dance and language to produce alternative orientations to the world.

A choreographic research project in collaboration with Es Morgan, drawing together ideas around witchcraft, transformation, radical politics and choreographic scores.

https://charlieashwell.com

Sandra Stanionyte, Between a Memory and a Memorial, Kunstraum, 2019. Photo by Jemima Yong.

Sandra Stanionyte is an interdisciplinary artist working in the field of performance art and architecture.


"I look at my work as a triangulation between memory, architecture, and the body as a site. I’m interested in the ways in which a study of space (architecture) is equivalent to a study of body in space.

And how a body, my body, can become a site to express personal memories and psychological states as a conceptual architecture which is both internal and external. Whilst physical architecture itself is transformed into a metaphor for both material and immaterial spaces. In other words: my body becomes a house leaking memories, a site for a research and a tool for action."

http://stanionyte.com

Kelvin Atmadibrata, til they are caught  in the trap, Kunstraum, 2019. Photo by Jemima Yong.

Kelvin Atmadibrata recruits superpowers awakened by puberty and adolescent fantasy.


Equipped by shōnen characters, kōhai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii, he often personifies power and strength into partially canon and fan fiction antiheroes to contest the masculine and erotica in Southeast Asia.

He works primarily with performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects compiled as installations. Approached as bricolages, Kelvin translates narratives and recreates personifications based on RPGs (Role-playing video games) theories and pop mythologies.

til they are caught in the trap is a plea for aid from self-inflicted enslavement and abuse.

https://kelvinatmadibrata.com

Kunstraum


performances, Saturday 28 September 2019

An day of performances by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, Radage & Hardaker, Augusto Cascales, and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.

We are working on making text and audio versions of Phoebe’s works available.

Leman Sevda Daricioğlu produces mostly in the field of performance art but also in other disciplines like installation, video, photography etc.  


They see the process of making art as a performative research on the self. They use the work as a tool to transform their limits and their subjectivity and also to create new corporal concepts to think, to imagine, to dream, to act, to be and to become.
 Response by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson.



Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, surrounded by water, Kunstraum, 2019. 
Photos by Julia Sterre.






Radage & Hardaker, Kunstraum, 2019. Photos by Julia Sterre.

Radage & Hardaker is the close collaboration of Alicia Radage and Ro Hardaker.


"Our work focuses on the body in a state of flux. We are concerned with gender and sexuality, care and violence. We are concerned with how the body interacts with other bodies and other materials and dismantling the hierarchy built into body politics and materialism, how it contaminates, is contaminated, dilutes, is diluted, concentrates, is concentrated. We make work with our bodies as the starting point."


Response by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson.



Augusto Cascales is a Brazilian artist based in London, working across different mediums at the intersection of spontaneity and criticality.


Using queer feminist and post-colonial positions, their (soma)tic ritualistic practice explores deviant forms of knowledge production and distribution.

Lucifer in My Belly is a somatic ritual weaving togther sigil magic, queer club culture and the mating call of fireflies.


Response by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson.



Augusto Cascales, Luciferin in My Belly , Kunstraum, 2019. Photos by Julia Sterre.




Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, You Are Being Let Into A Space, Kunstraum, 2019. Photos by Julia Sterre.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist living and working in London.


"I CREATE WORK THAT SEEKS TO ARCHIVE BLACK TRANS EXPERIENCE. I USE TECHNOLOGY TO IMAGINE OUR LIVES IN ENVIRONMENTS THAT CENTRE OUR BODIES...

THOSE LIVING, THOSE THAT HAVE PASSED AND THOSE THAT HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN
"


Response by Phoebe Patey-Ferguson.

]performance s p a c e[


performances, Folkestone, November 2018

An evening of performances by Alex Billingham, Niko Wearden, selina bonelli and Joseph Morgan Schofield, hosted by ]performance s p a c e[.



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



selina bonelli 

photos by Manuel Vason


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



Joseph Morgan Schofield - yesterdary I dreamt of flying

photos by Manuel Vason


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.


arnolfini


performances, Bristol, October 2018

An evening of performances by DAS GLAMOR, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Kitty Fedorec, Luke Jordan and Sean O’Driscoll, and hosted by Arnolfini.



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:

“desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire, desire”

Text by Charlie Ashwell.


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.


hackney showroom


performances, London, October 2018

An evening of performances by Alicia Radage, Anni Movsisyan, Eunjung Kim, Hellen Burrough and Joseph Morgan Schofield.


Response by Benjamin Sebastian
I’m going to write from my heart.

As such I will be writing through memory (time)

With desire (intent)

I will remember what I want                                                                                  to remember.

Everything is relative (not binary) and partial for our hearts are prisms with infinite sides.

By heart, I in no way suggest the shiny pink chocolate box image packaged to us by hetero cis patriarchal capitalism, but rather; the relentless fleshy muscle that pushes and pulls a bloody life force throughout the interiority of ones body.

I’m starting here. In the organic matter. With the flesh...

I remember your burns. I remember your wings. (J.M.S)


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 remember your words. I remember your blood. (A.R)


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.


I remember the clay. I remember the fruit. (E.K)


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.

I remember your hands. I remember the sound. (H.B)


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.


I remember your future. I remember Her past. (A.M)


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.



Future Ritual: Land, Art, Faith, Performance CIC

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