Taking Root: Taking Part

Am the guest psychogeographer on the research phase of the redevelopment of the garden at Camden Arts Centre. Am exploring site as evocation of memory and escape from the quotidian through a video, a 2D work, a walk and a presentation.

I'llll be presenting my research findings along side other project partners: a zoologist, choreographer, psychologist, poet and architect.

Should be interesting to see varied perspectives on nature, walking and its inclusion in an urban setting.

The event is free, but places are limited and Camden Art Centre are taking bookings on 020 7472 5500 or at camdenartscentre.org.

London Riots and Structural Violence

Photo: Sebastian S. Fuller

Spent the last few days doing what most people in London avoided, going towards places where skirmishes were taking place. I wanted to see for myself exactly what was going down, mediated information is never the same and like it or not simplifies any extraordinary event into a single lens. Even the pictures that my companion shot that night seem somehow much more violent than the actuality of walking down the street. 

I cycled round the confrontations early on Monday around 6:30pm at Hackney Central and a large amount of people in the street just watching lines of riot police form and reform. The mood of the crowd was celebratory, with a mix of ages, races, genders. I saw veiled girls, lanky teenagers, council mums with their prams, older Eastenders holding a can of beer, hipsters on bicycles and a few groups of young guys in hoodies definitely looking like this was the most fun they've ever had. The only sign of political unrest was a single young guy with a swollen black eye and an agitated staffie at the end of a lead. He was shouting about police abuse, violence against minorities, lack of government help among other topics. I appreciated his anger and recognised at least here a cause and motivation. I cant say I saw the same power of protest in the fat teen who came past in a balaclava causing a group of teens to launch into hysterical laughter.

Nothing was happening really. Then about a dozen officers with barking German Shepards moved towards the scattering of people near St. Augustine's Tower. The most aggressive people there were the police so I decided to leave but quickly was boxed in. They began shouting at people to leave, actually many of us were trying to. One man who was walking through didnt realise what was going on and got yelled at by an over eager officer. At first startled he then got very upset and the situation easily escalated. I left it was clear that the antagonism would continue, the kids would break stuff up and run from the cops and the police would have a real field day.

Zooming out of the effect and looking at the cause:

There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored

Haringey youth club closures: 'There'll be riots' - video

and for a step-by-step of the match that lit the fire: 

Anatomy of the London Riots

But the prevailing sentiment heard on the media is of 'us' law-abiding citizens and 'them' the thugs who are rioting. The condescending tone of this BBC article is a prime example: 'What turns people into looters?'. Though the riots were not race-based at all (the kids I saw breaking glass came in all shades) it does feed into the white british fear of minorities. And how can it not, in a country where wealth disparity and racism is both rampant and unspoken. And lest the UK pride itself in how mixed the country is lets not forget the actual statistics, it is over 92% white and even these statistics when you navigate them are clearly coming from an ethnocentric point of view, an us and them comparison.

The most surprising thing to me is not that the riots have happened, its that anyone is surprised at all. When you punch someone in the face what do you expect? People seem startled by a burning car and smashed window but what about the violence of policy and budget cuts. This is a direct result of poor social policy of a government continually led by a core of well-funded individuals who have no experience with need, poverty or discrimination. 

I recommend Gilligan's book Violence: reflections on a national epidemic to begin understanding root cause and subsequent effect in the body politic. Though he is writing about the US prison system, his perspective on marginalisation and its aftermath are spot on. And I also keep thinking about Paul Farmer's take on structural violence in his book Pathologies of Power and how poverty fractures the social fabric. According to Farmer the capitalist division between affluent and poor, creates a series of politic manoeuvres which not only sustain the status quo but are violent in their impact on poor communities. Read this is a great article on structural violence and human rights for extended explanations on the topic. 

This is why it seems to me when as a governing principle you kick the most economically-challenged in a the teeth, you're going to get some broken windows and missing trainers... 

Linked by Graeme Miller

Did the intrepid journey that is the audio tour of Graeme Miller's archive of stories surrounding the construction of the M11 in East London and subsequent displacement of locals and protest culture that arose from the development.

Alas technology has erased all my notes, but I'll try to give an impression. Linked is a tour of East London given through a series of sound installations that are broadcast from transmitters attached to light poles across a 4 mile stretch. You have to pick up your own receiving devise and headphones in order to listen to the work, but these are hard to come by. Luckily Redbridge Museum had a few, adding a good amount of miles to our journey but somehow part of the adventure (if you plan on actually doing this walk plan ahead).  Though there is a map, finding each transmitter is still a challenge, though a group of us were lucky to be guided by Oliver James Hymans, who wrote a dissertation on psychogeography with this piece as a case study.

As you approach each transmitter the sound slowly starts feeding into the headphones. Its slightly eery and ghostly, as if you are overhearing a conversation through an open window somewhere nearby. It becomes clear the recordings are testimonials of people affected by the construction of the M11 motorway and destruction of well anything in its path. The recordings are sampled and remixed with music giving it the impression of an early negativland track. The testimonials range from residents, to squatters, to elderly focusing mostly on the energy of protest and the destruction of sites of memory and places of local identity and history. I particularly like the transmission coming from a light pole in between two chestnut trees that referenced The Battle of George Green and the feeling that the takeover of the park by protesters was like a return the common land before the Acts of Enclosures privatised areas across England, a fantastic analogy and still powerful today.

I was interested in the people who lived in the houses near these transmitters and I wondered if they had any idea about it. Though I loved the experience, even for me who loves to explore and is interested in site, history, memory and place this was not an easy task to fulfill. This was mostly due to such poor maintenance of the artwork itself by Museum of London and Arts Admin. I couldn't help to wonder about those transmitters powered 24/7 and broadcasting empty messages to deaf ears. Perhaps this is the route history eventually takes, most people forgetting the struggles of the past for the comforts of the future. After the work I felt happy to have learned a piece of history and a new respect for a locale and yet somewhat melancholic in thinking about our constant move towards greater privitisation and development. As a radicant myself I wonder about how to save and respect roots while helping us move across borders freely.

The M11 felt both like a massive border and yet somehow an escape route...


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

CTR 147 / Summer 2011 “The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy”

Canadian Theatre Review investigates the power of performance as a tool for critical thinking and social and political action within and beyond the university theatre studies classroom. 


Some great articles, unfortunately you have to be linked into academia to access or pay, not very activist of them but hey suppose its changing the system from the inside. Or ask your Anonymous friend to hack it.


The Activist Classroom: Performance and Pedagogy

11 Rooms Group Show - Manchester Art Gallery

Just came back from Manchester International Festival, a really fantastic civic take on arts and culture integrated into an urban environment. Went to see Robert Wilson's Life and Death of Marina Abramovich, but seeing as it was one of the biggest cultural disappointments of my life I'll focus on 11 Rooms, a group show of live art / performance at Manchester Art Gallery.

I'm going to focus a descriptive analyses of some of the works that I felt were socially-engaged in one way or another.

Santiago Sierra - presented Veterans of the war of Northern Ireland, where a man stands in the corner facing a wall. Both times I went in the room it was a soldier in full army gear in a frozen attention facing the corner. I walked quite close and could sense his awareness but discipline to remain still. His uniform was crisp new and clean looking. I found it a powerful allegory that was both political and simple. Apparently there were many veterans who stood for a brief period of time and all were in civilian clothes but I didn't see this. I'm not sure how powerful the statement would have been for me with some guy dressed in black. A performer I knew in one of the other pieces informed me that the particular soldier I saw was not enlisted for the artwork but saw the exhibition and requested to participate, which further expands the work's impact in the social sphere.

Tino Seghal - presented Anne Lee 2011, where a young girl maybe around ten enters the room and engages the audience in a painfully scripted monologue about commodity, time, systemisation and self (there were a series of them playing the part). She awkwardly poses questions, waiting for an answer only to continue with segments of script. The effect on the surrounding audience was to stupify their gaze with a slightly condescending smile reserved for precocious children. It's very much about you somehow, as she asks: 'would you prefer to be too busy or not busy enough?' A good question for a room full of culture vultures who probably possess middle class values of work and commodity, Seghal prods the audience he knows will be there. But somehow you can't judge the littel girl by the same set of standards so her eloquent words seem to resonate stronger. 

Some of the other works also relied on acting skills, something that charges the performance with a whole other set of values and forms of communication and reception that resonate on a totally different level for me. An example is Roman Ondák' Swap, where a jovial man at a table requests or rather tries to convince oglers to swap whatever object he has for another. Reminded me of the man who traded a paperclip until it became a house. Its a game I also play with my students, but somehow in the art gallery seemed trite. 

I'll mention two more I enjoyed though I wouldn't categorise as Applied Live Art, still resonated: Laura Lima's Men=Flesh/Women=Flesh where the ceiling of the gallery is lowered to about 1/2 a metre off the ground and as you peer in on your stomach you can see a hanging lamp laying on the floor and a person with a disability laying inside. I disliked the voyeur aspect of it, and found it slightly didactic but was still a beautiful image. Finally the whole show would have been upped incredibly had John Baldessari gotten his way and put a dead corpse on display in the same position as Andrea Mantegna's Foreshortened Christ, instead we got the archive presented in A4 email format.

Paper Panel – Putting words in their mouths: verbatim and authenticity

I will be presenting a paper on authorship and community engagement this Thursday at Central School of Speech and Drama's conference:

Authoring Theatre


Paper Panel – Putting words in their mouths: verbatim and authenticity
THURSDAY 14 JULY, 16:15 – 17:45
REHEARSAL ROOM 6, WEST BLOCK

PUTTING WORDS IN THEIR MOUTHS: VERBATIM AND AUTHENTICITY

Chair:
Amanda Stuart Fisher

Presenters:
Maria Jose Contreras Lorenzini - Dramaturgies of the real In Chile: the problem of authorship
Steve Gilroy - Let’s get real about ‘verbatim’
Roberto Sánchez-Camus – Triangulated City Beirut: Co-Authorship in Applied Live Art

THURSDAY 14 JULY, 16:15 – 17:45
REHEARSAL ROOM 6, WEST BLOCK

You can read my abstract online.

NYLON

It's hard to wrap your head around the scale of New York and London as they are so topographically different.
London is a complete mess of roads neatly organised into concentric zones that seem to spread out forever until suddenly it hits the M25 motorway and becomes farmland.
New York is a neatly organised set of roads set on to a mess of islands and inlets and seems to be encircled by endless suburbs with farmland somewhere way down the I95 highway.

I made loads of versions of these maps in some sense to put my two realities together, they somehow help me better contextualise and understand my place in these two twin cities (fraternal twins of course)

Trial of The Mariner

Set in a dystopian future, 8 sailors venture into the radioactive oceans to discover new resources, to their horror they become stranded upon the Plastic Continent floating around the North Pacific gyre where the Skipper, the last remaining survivor is taken to trial by the Plastic Creatures for crimes against Nature...

Described as a performance of 'deranged genius', our latest production by Lotos Collective

www.trialofthemariner.com



Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.


Click here for behind the scenes rehearsal shots!

Art, Time and Experimentation at Long Player in Trinity Buoys Wharf

LONG SUMMER EVENINGS AT TRINITY BUOY WHARF WITH LONGPLAYER

A SERIES OF TALKS AROUND THE THEMES OF ART, TIME AND EXPERIMENTATION

FEATURING: RICHARD WILSON (ARTIST), ANDREW KOTTING (FILM DIRECTOR), IAIN SINCLAIR (WRITER), PAUL SHEPHEARD (ARCHITECT AND WRITER), DAVID ROONEY (CURATOR AT SCIENCE MUSEUM)

JUNE 29th 6pm – 9pm Launch

Arrive between 6pm and 7pm to gain rare evening access to Longplayer, Jem Finer’s 1000 year musical composition that has been playing from the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf since the first moments of 2000.

Richard Wilson is to open with a one-off performance lecture ‘THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT’. Wilson will be showing his rarely seen films in a talk about his use of films in sculptures.

7pm at The Lighthouse, Trinity Buoy Wharf, Orchard Place, London E14 0JW

28th of July: Paul Shepheard to present a talk entitled ‘The Bowl of the Horizon’

7th of September: Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair to present on the Long Pedal and their new collaboration ‘SWANDOWN’

28th of September: David Rooney to present ‘Navigating experimental invention, survival and destruction: the Royal Observatory and GMT’

For more information visit http://longplayer.org

Free admission, to book email: lara@longplayer.org

Race as Military Propaganda

I was researching the Detroit race riots of 1943, when I came upon some Japanese propaganda duringWorld War 2. This lead me to this incredible website: Psychological Warfare, Psychological Operations (PSYOP), Black Propaganda, and Aerial Propaganda Leaflets.

Check out the race as military propaganda page

The Argument Room

The Argument Room is a live, interactive debating forum involving two people, branching out from this to reach an unlimited number via the web. Its primary concerns are the arts and social justice.

Coming Up:

June 16th Juliet Lyon, Director of Prison Reform Trust
July 21st Chris Goode, actor, writer and director

A great new streaming format for interaction and debate. Worth checking out

http://www.theargumentroom.net

The Journal for Artistic Research

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an inter-national, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal for the identification, publication and dissemination of artistic research and its methodologies, from all arts disciplines. With the aim of displaying practice in a manner that respects artists'

modes of presentation, JAR abandons the traditional journal article format and offers its contributors a dynamic online canvas where text can be woven together with image, audio and video. These research documents called ‘expositions’ provide a unique reading experience while

fulfilling the expectations of scholarly dissemination. 

http://www.jar-online.net/