ihaveanewjobamanalivewithenergyandpotential

I have a new job. I’m artist in residence at Sizewell C nuclear power station, which is under construction on the Suffolk coast. It should lead to some new work and some new community collaborations over the next year. I’ll be sharing stuff soon. Really looking forward to seeing how it all goes.

eatlookeatlookeateat

So - a few days in Lyon for the Biennale to look at art and to eat ‘site-specific food’. I've always found Lyon to be an interesting but harsh city, the traffic layout is fairly hard-core, and the rivers can make it a little chilly. There was some interesting work, in great spaces. As ever, a lot of textile activity, maybe somebody should create a textile art course! As well as the physical work exhibited there was some challenging, thoughtful video pieces including Pilar Abarracin https://www.pilaralbarracin.com/obras.html and Jesper Just https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Jesper_Just/41#news It's always fantastic to see art in unusual buildings - this was no exception - the Grande Loco space was superb in a post-industrial-abandoned-building kind of way, with excellent flooring that revealed a narrative of loss and change. Rethinking what used to be there after the grinders and bolt cutters did their work became part of the visit. Work was also sighted in an archaeological museum, a car park and Cité internationale de la Gastronomie de Lyon - Grand Hôtel-Dieu. The garden of the Museum of Fine Arts is in the former cloister of the Abbey of the Ladies of Saint-Pierre which used to be a hospital for the poor was truly fascinating. In terms of food....OMG beef cheek, leg of lamb, chicken tagine, pork and pistachio sausage, bone marrow with salt and pickles, Iles flottantes (possibility my fave pudding ever, if on a menu I have to have it, I have no choice) this one was pink due to the addition of praline and I even managed to get some boudin noir for breakfast. If in Lyon you must go to Brasserie Georges it's an institution, especially the birthday tradition - if you boiled down all of France it would look and feel like this place. https://www.brasseriegeorges.com/en/

busyheadshotsintallinn

A busy week – lots to tell next week. Used the time in Tallinn to get some photos to use as ‘headshots’! Onto screens – Alita – a carefully crafted Pinocchio sci-fi origin story. Lee – flashbacks reminds us of the power of the image. Industry – you may not understand it fully, but you will understand enough, you are screwed and they don’t care.

 

backinthebackinthebackintheUSSR

So - a few days in Tallinn. A fascinating place with a both short and long history. The USSR looms everywhere, buildings and housing in general feels other. I had travelled far away enough from England for the shops to be full of food I had never seen before. Managed a glorious sauna and swam in a still, clear Baltic sea, ate tasty food - mainly smoked - ribs, salmon, elk, bear, deer, cods roe.... alongside some unusual cakes. Drank some of the most powerfully tasting beers infused with pine needles, juniper, and cloud berries. The extraordinary experience that is the old town is like stepping back in time, cycling through it is challenging with cobbles the size of a child's head but you gotta love buildings with hudge gothic text painted on them. A party at the art school, which actually feels like an art school, was unhinged, what a great place to study. Droped into some interesting, challeging  exhibitions.The colours of the Ukrainian flag are everywhere, which is understandable, there is a solidarity which is complicated by history. I have just begun to get my head around some of what Tallinn is about but feel I need to return.

itistrueifyouseeit

Continuing to explore ai - creating images for a presentation about materiasl text promps around cavemen operating textile equipment look disturbingly like jehovah's witness literature. Meanwhile a day in London to obsentricaly have a sauna but dropped into the Barbican to see an extraordinary amount of plywood in Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's exhibition and the Whitechapel to see one of my all time important artists Lygia Clark. Her approach to art making has informed my own approach to running workshops. I connected my way of thinking about bookmaking to her relationship to audience. You get to hold and operate replicas of her Bichos series, just don't sit on the plyth while you do it or you will be told off - great way to encourage audience's especially when you have paid £15:00 to get in. The extraordinary Archive of Dissent by Peter Kennard is free and alone worth the visit. Onto screens - finally got to see the beautiful Perfect Day - so thoughtful.

extractsfromthepastandfuture

I’ve been looking again at the catalogue notes from the show – Manual for Survival in Hamburg – below some extracts…

The profound changes that we are experiencing on an everyday level, from the destruction of the environment to the age of pandemics, have already transformed human subjectivity. The prevailing sensitivity that can be discerned today is a sort of "post-apocalyptic melancholy," the sense of an ending that is unlike any other ending before, an ending that is inevitable if we continue with our current world system, an ending meaning the end of the biosphere and mass extinction, whether it is rapid or slow, the feeling that everything changes and that the only thing that's certain is extinction. This naturally creates anxiety-and leads to the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of coping with the irreversible loss.

The past is as equally contested as the future. Time itself, it seems, has become the medium of conflict; if you unearth history, if you free time from its seemingly logical and linear path, you can see beyond the realm of the real-which is always constructed by those with the power to rule over the stories that govern our societies.

Religion is a ritual invented to create meaning here and now and today and tomorrow-and God is needed to find a structure, to achieve community. Faith, as different from religion, is a practice that helps you to position yourself in time and in space.

What is human time? What is natural time? And what if the two collide? When the British in the seventeenth century made their way to what would later be called North America, many of the colonists were overwhelmed by the majestic ecosystem and abundance of wildlife. But the colonial hunger for resources quickly resulted in mass deforestation, mass extinction, and the genocide of indigenous populations. Human life had existed long before on the continent, but rather than claiming to be rulers over a plot of land, native tribes saw themselves as part of the system that surrounded them; their role was more akin to that of a steward than an owner.

Can we tell the story of suppression by using the master's tools? What is the price of education, of knowledge-or rather of knowing? Who decides which voices get to be heard? And aren't these tools in the end just perpetuating systems of hierarchy? "It's not just about what we know, but how we come to know it,"

What is the mirage of power that we are presented with? What is the way politics work? And how does it distort what we perceive as reality? How does it disfigure the people who represent politics-politicians, lobbyists, suitcase-bearers? Outside, inside? And what are the consequences of this spectacle of politics for democracy in the twenty-first century?

Or, in other words, what is power? As Europe turns itself into a fortress, the values that helped create Europe are undermined: What is the Enlightenment, if Europe allows thousands and thousands and thousands to drown, turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave?

Who owns what? First, we thought the internet was for free; then we realized that we were the product. Facebook was not free, Twitter was not free, we were not free. The idealism of the early days of the digital yonder is long gone. What remains is cold calculation and doses of disgust. But is this the right attitude? In the age of Al, can we afford to turn away and let corporations rule this emerging new world?And connected to this question: What is the passing of beauty, what is futility, vanity, decay, what is the passing of time in one's life and what is the connection to the bigger space, call it culture, civilization, the universe?

Who owns what? First, we thought the internet was for free; then we realized that we were the product. Facebook was not free, Twitter was not free, we were not free. The idealism of the early days of the digital yonder is long gone. What remains is cold calculation and doses of disgust. But is this the right attitude? In the age of Al, can we afford to turn away and let corporations rule this emerging new world?

What do we think of when we think of resistance? Is it a protest, an unruly mob, armed backlash? Finding themselves at the centre of a culture war, many trans and nonbinary persons, specifically kids, see their sheer existence questioned on a daily basis.

Crime is a stigma, but for whom? Is crime committed by a person or inflicted on a person? What is the role of society, what is the relation between power, poverty, and the rule of the law-which tends to support both power and poverty, the codified dividing chu line for civilization.

One failure of liberalism is on an anthropological level: the assumption that everything starts with the individual. The societies that we build on this assumption are limiting both our imagination and our realities. The lives we construct on this premise are poorer, less intense and happy-community is what we are made for, and community is what we need to build.

Is it an event? Or is it a process? Is it fast or slow? Is it loud or quiet? Does it announce itself? Is it something we can anticipate? Can we wait for it to happen? What is the meaning of anticipating without knowing? Can we prepare for what we don't know? Or do we know?

If a bullet crosses a border, if death is sent from nation to nation, who is to judge?

What is technology? Energy running through a system. What is knowledge? Information embedded in a system. What is intelligence? The way to read and understand that system. Then what is the difference between technological and human intelligence?

Elsewhere it's been a busy week - Hofesh Shechter's From England with Love was truly awesome - from the mournful beginning through to the tragic ending, all was superbly lit. Celebrating 25 years of Home live art at Shoreditch town hall was 'liveart interesting' 6 performances on a loop. The latest Hayward shows are worth a look - Haegue Yang has her usual material repertoire of blinds and traditional techniques to create exciting work that is both aesthetically fun through the play of light as well as the political statement that the use of blinds supports. Huang Po-Chin has a great video work of a performance involving wearing copious shirts and cutting them off, alongside photographs of a version of Erwin Wurm incorrectly wearing items of clothing. Onto screens – Will & Harper – sad yet glorious road trip. The Outrun – trauma and more trauma. Deep into Fantasmas – what to say – almost indescribably odd, yet wonderous.

thesmeltofpost-industrialdampness

An evening at Dance East for conversation and film to celebrate Rosemary Lee’s dance for film https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/profiles/rosemary-lee/ I loved the film of Circadian and it was fun to see myself in the audience – proof I was there!! https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/project/circadian/ but I also loved her early films, Greenman in particular, especially its visual links to say somebody like Svankmajer and absurdist Northern European cinema. A weekend in Birmingham for the Fierce Festival. A feast of live art in the second city. What a blast – highlights include Ramona Nagabczyńska’s  Silenzio, Steven Cohen’s moving and semi traumatic (watching a cow get slaughtered type of trauma) put your heart under your feet... and walk! And Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) by Tiran Willemse. A dance piece that slowly drags you from the challenges of gender, into race and intergenerational trauma. It was great to be amongst ‘my people’ experiencing challenging, marginalised art in spaces that smelt of post-industrial dampness! Popped into the Ikon to see an interesting show about love and war, but the most interesting show was the offsite by Exodus Crooks in the exchange, just like a heist movie. Meanwhile I’ve become a fan of sauna – I love the community aspect of Hackney Community Sauna, as well as intense body experience that is the sauna/plunge pools.