Bill Aitchison
Title: In the Middle
Abstract: This audio work comprising of a spoken text and audio accompaniment, is the result of a multi-visit residency at Allenheads Contemporary Arts in Northumberland. The theme that it explores is the national and international connectedness of this small and rather isolated mountain village that sits in the North Pennines. Given that this was made in 2016, the Brexit referendum plays a major role in shaping context of this work and many of the debate topics that were current at that time find their way directly into the piece. The text frequently interrupts itself, questions its own statements and sometimes even resorts to name calling. It could be likened to an argument between a “remainer“ and “leaver” in the village pub, something I did get to witness on more than one occasion. In this sense the work is a dialogue, albeit a sometimes fractious one. The audio accompaniment that runs alongside the text goes some way to illustrating it but then develops its own independent musical logic. This creates a second type of dialogue within this piece: that between the spoken text and the sound. Neither of the two of these dialogues attempts a resolution so this piece remains open-ended in character; the staging of differences with the listener positioned, as the title implies, In the Middle.
Bio: Bill Aitchison is a performance artist whose work has been presented in major museums, galleries, theatres, festivals in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Australia and China. His output is as prolific as it is diverse with projects taking an extremely wide range of forms. Despite this, his work as a whole is recognisable for its formal clarity, ambition of intent, dry humour and innovative use of site. Aitchison has produced artist books, is a popular blogger on the subject of contemporary arts and tourism, has made several works for radio and screen and has had his critical and journalistic articles published in several countries. He is a graduate of Ecole de Mime Corporel Dramatique and has a practice-as-research PhD from Goldsmiths College in the field of performance art. He teaches performance studies, drama and writing at Nanjing University, China.
Louise Atkinson & Victoria Kortekaas
Title: The High Rise Project
Abstract: Our paper will present our recent collaboration, The High Rise Project. Drawing on visual ethnography and socially engaged practice, together with residents we explored the links between architecture and social relations within municipal highrise buildings and council-built estates in the Lincoln Green area of Leeds. Through exploring the history of social housing, we aim to highlight the stories, benefits, and challenges of living in council-built estates, as well as related issues, including sense of community, family history, class, and impact on health and wellbeing. Our mission through this work is to use creativity and art as a way for people to tell their own stories and challenge stereotypes of people living in municipal housing. Our collaboration combines our own experiences of living in social housing, along with our skills and interests in co-producing high quality art with communities.
Bios: Louise Atkinson is a visual artist, researcher and educator, specialising in the relationship between art and ethnography. She uses a range of media and techniques, including artist books, postcards, drawing, textiles, and sculpture, tailoring her approach to meet the requirements of the project or artwork. Her research and practice involves responding to ideas around people and place, creating work which represents the experiences, associations and memories of a particular area. Through her practice-based research, she also collaborates with other artists and participants to create co-produced installations.
Victoria Kortekaas is a visual artist who works with a variety of different media and technologies, including photography, textiles, web design, typography, digital art, and desktop publishing. Her practice highlights and explores issues surrounding economic and social inequalities in working class communities. Through her practice she develops participatory strategies to enable individuals and groups to tell their stories through creative media. Her previous work has included a series of photoworks and artist books depicting participants responses to societal prejudices around unemployment.
Patricia Azevedo & Clare Charnley
Title: Games of distance
Abstract: Games of distance is part of a long term collaboration between Patricia Azevedo and Clare Charnley. Living on opposite sides of the world, they use tactics and technologies such as postal services, synchronic action and skype webcams to build series of a personal workspaces they can both inhabit. This project forms a, sometimes humorous, response to being unable to be physically together. The aim is to perform the impossibility of their position – to recognise and parody the gap between them through a series of online micro performances to and with each other. These one-to-one performatic dialogues (sometimes with objects) happen in a place and time that doesn’t exist, even in the moment of recording. The action itself fabricates space; a sort of heterotopia.
Bios: Azevedo (Brazil) and Charnley (UK) have been collaborating for ten years. Performance, exhibitions and screenings of their joint work include Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, UK: Belfast Exposed: Torino Esposizioni Turin: PNEM Sound Art Festival, Netherlands: Rose Theatre, Kingston on Thames, UK: Coastal Currents, Hastings: Giessen Video Festival, Germany: Beacon Art Project, Lincoln, UK: No quiet place, The Tetley Leeds: Bogotá Experimental Film Festival. Both artists also have independent practices. Charnley’s recent exhibitions include Spring Lamb, Yorkshire Sculpture Park: Sunscreen, Venice Biennale Bilateral Event: Domestic II, Word of Warning, Manchester; inTRANSIT, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, London: Space21, Erbil, Kurdistan-Iraq: Artists Moving Image Festival, Tramway, Glasgow. Azevedo’s recent exhibitions include Fotos Contam Fatos, Sao Paulo: Centro de Arte Helio Oiticica, Rio and The Congo Biennial of contemporary Art. She is curator of Festival Internacional de Fotografia de Belo Horizonte. Her PhD on her collaborative work with Charnley has won recommendation for publication.
http://clarecharnley.com/games-distance.html
Angela Bartram
Title: Dogs and the Elderly: companionship as practice in practice
Abstract: We seek comfort from other beings and this often finds a solution in our relationships with dogs. Walter Benjamin said “no single dog is physically or temperamentally like another,”[1] which in part attests to our interspecies domestic closeness based on reliance and need. Nowhere is this seen more than in their companionship with the elderly. The positivity for health of a life with dogs is relevant to the elderly, those may feel isolated and vulnerable without another with whom to share life. Here, dogs become a vital companion, alleviating depression and isolation and giving a sense of usefulness. Although sharing one’s life with a dog gives purpose and comfort, it also brings anxieties regarding care and separation should that relationship change or cease. For the elderly, this concerns being worried of their dog’s fate should they enter managed housing or care facilities, or if separated by illness or death. The ‘burden’[2] they would leave sees the elderly intentionally deny homing another dog should theirs die. This denial renders the dog a last memorial to the significance of the companionship that informed life.
This presentation discusses my art project ‘Dogs and the Elderly’ that focuses on the significance and benefit of interspecies companionship towards the end of life. This project with the Alzheimer’s Society demonstrates how interspecies cohabitation is valuable for emotional health and wellbeing. Participants offer heart-warming and heart-breaking accounts of a lonelier and dog-free life when their current companion becomes their last. The fear of not being able to ensure safe continuing care produces a self-imposed loneliness, one where it seems better to know they will not commit a dog to an unknown future than to benefit from their friendship now. The dog becomes the living remains of a relationship that can no longer be accommodated.
[1] Benjamin, W. (1930) True Dog Stories (Radio Berlin broadcast for children, 27 September 1930); trans. Jonathan Lutes, with Lisa Harries Schumann and Diana Reese, in Radio Benjamin, ed. Lecia Rosenthal, London: Verso, p. 182-188.
[2] Interviewees in the project all state they would leave a burden for their families should they house another dog after their current one dies.
Bio: Angela Bartram is an artist and researcher exploring the instabilities within definitions of the animal, co-living and companion species, and appropriate strategies for documenting the ephemeral. Bartram has a PhD from Middlesex University and is Associate Professor and Head of Arts Research at the University of Derby.
Simon Burrows
Title: An invitation to dialogue: dialogue at conference across time and space
Abstract: This proposal of a workshop to take place inside the SHED is to explore how my fine art photographic practice challenges and questions of dialogic modes of perception, within a mobile and intimate space. I will run a workshop and present a pop up exhibiton in the SHED. During the workshop I will facilitate discussion about how I have created different methods to engage the viewer with my work -using conversation to develop and advance my own research process. It will draw on examples from a new body of work produced for Lakeside Arts as part of the Bauhaus centenary celebrations. I will invite workshop participants to discuss ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger) and look at the artworks on display in the SHED and create a new discourse for dialogically motivated photographic practice.
Bio: Simon Burrows is a MA Nottingham Trent University Fine Art photographer who experiences enhanced night vision caused by colour-blindness. Simon’s project “The Act of Enquiry” is an investigation into the relationship between the complexities of vision and how individuals perceive their surroundings through a photographic practice-based project. Simon is influenced by his personal experiences and imitates his night vision within his photographic work. His project is a documentation of his night walks which leads to an investigation of light reflected on certain objects. Simon has built a relationship with the inhabitants of the island of Pingelap which is better known as colour-blind island.This is to examine the evidence of enhanced night vision within colour-blind individuals. However, a colour-blind individual can discover the patterns hidden aesthetic beauty when viewed in the dark. The story of Pingelap has sparked scientific investigation by the likes of Oliver Sacks.
Jane Bacon & Vida Midgelow
Title: BreathBone: Discussion and sharing of practice
Abstract: Presented by Vida Midgelow and Jane Bacon, co-directors of Choreographic Lab, this session will reveal the creative strategies and interior processes used in the development and performance of BreathBone.
Quiet, reflective and immersive, BreathBone creates spaces of encounter for heightened inner awareness. Audiences are invited to enter an intimate performance duet where gesture, voice and sound generate an evocative and meditative experience.
As an improvised ‘choreography’ of the felt sense, the work uses methods drawn from therapy, mindfulness and performance to bring us closer to what it is to be human, giving voice to interior spaces of flesh, the immediate present and the phantasmic.
This session will share extracts from the practice and open discussion as to the efficacy of performance forms designed to evoke reflective states of awareness.
All attendees will be gifted a score so that they might take forward the practice. This work is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Dance4 and Middlesex University. .
Bio: Jane Bacon and Vida Midgelow are co Directors of the Choreographic Lab (1996), an organisation committed to practice research and the articulation of creative processes and Associate research artists at Dance4. Their work includes installed performances as well as writing (see choreographiclab.co.uk). Midgelow is Professor of Dance and Choreography at Middlesex Uni and Bacon is Emerita Professor at University of Chichester as well as a Jungian Analyst.
http://www.choreographiclab.co.uk/
Rosa Cisneros & Marie-Louise Crawley
Marie-Louise Crawley (in mask) in Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (2018). Photo Credit: Brandon Kahn
Title: CultureMoves
Abstract: ‘CultureMoves (https://www.culturemoves.eu/)is a European-funded project which explores the intersections of dance, technology, site, tourism and the Europeana online library. The project runs for 18 months and aims to develop a series of digital tools that will enable new forms of touristic engagement and dance educational resources by leveraging re-use of Europeana content. CultureMoves aims to demonstrate the value of reimagining the ways in which dance can be used to enhance the tourist experience and also to encourage dancers to develop their creativity (as the tourist site may serve as an opportunity for the performer to experiment and engage with different audiences and settings). Central to the project is a consideration of how dance content can be used to promote a destination and how can dance create new forms of engagement to spread the knowledge of cultural heritage and the history of a territory. We propose an interactive workshop where participants can engage with the project’s materials but also have the space to discuss dance, site and digital tools within a touristic context. The workshop aims to capture the voices of dancers, choreographers and other artists and researchers in the space and offers them an opportunity to learn about the project, the two digital tools being developed, and Europeana itself. Furthermore, in the spirit of the project, the workshop will allow for meaningful cross-disciplinary exchanges and dialogues that explore what a hybrid practice might look like and how this is of value to the future of the dance and cultural heritage sectors.
Bios: Rosemary Cisneros is a researcher, dancer, choreographer and curator who works closely with the RomArchive and many NGOs. She is involved in various EU-funded projects which aim to make education accessible to vulnerable groups and ethnic minorities, and part of cultural heritage projects that bring dance and digital technologies together. Marie-Louise Crawley is a researcher, choreographer and dancer. Her research interests include dance and museums, and areas of intersection between Classics and Dance Studies, such as ancient dance and the performance of epic. She is Research Assistant on CultureMoves at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE, Coventry University, UK). Sarah Whatley is Director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University, UK. Her research interests extend to dance and new technologies, intangible cultural heritage, somatic dance practice and pedagogy, dance documentation, and inclusive dance practice; she has published widely on these themes.
Emma Cocker
Title: Being in the Midst – Conversation-as-material
Emma Cocker and Clare Thornton, Conversation Table. Image courtesy of the artists.
Abstract:
Conversation-as-material is a practice attentive to — whilst attempting to make tangible — the live circumstances of dialogic production, in an attempt to shed light on the process of collaboration and the wrestle therein to find a shared language. The quest is for a not-yet-known vocabulary, where meaning does not exist prior to utterance but rather is co-produced through the dialogic process itself, through an inter-subjective and immanent mode of sense-making emerging from the enmeshing of different voices engaged in live exchange. Over and over, turned up and inside out, language is rolled around in the mouth until it starts to yield. Within the practice of ‘conversation-as-material’, dialogue is recorded, transcribed and then distilled to reveal an emergent infra-personal textual poetics, a means of writing-without-writing. The textual transcripts are approached as aesthetic material for playful appropriation and reworking, creating a feedback loop between artistic production and reflection.
Emma Cocker will draw on performative examples of ‘conversation-as-material’ generated within her own collaborative practice, alongside reflecting on the conditions necessary for dialogic encounter: the principles of receptivity and reciprocity, practices of listening and of attention.
Bio: Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker’s research enquiry unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker’s recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.
http://not-yet-there.blogspot.com/
Sheelagh Colclough
Title:Tea, Theory and Chat; mapping attempts to construct knowledge
Abstract: My short paper proposal is centred around my current doctoral practice based research on the theories underpinning participatory arts practice (community and socially engaged arts) in Northern Ireland, focusing thematically on the areas of value, activism, pedagogy and ethics (V.A.P.E.). I will present and examine my dialogic practice-as-fieldwork experiences, grounded in group discussion, stimulated by learning resources and ongoing discursive mapping based around a process of ongoing collective reflection. My research methodology, designed to facilitate a critically engaged process of knowledge transfer, anchored by a collaborative co-learning approach between experts by experience and artist researcher, aims to allow for insight into a wide range of lived experience within a cross section of voices that make up the participatory arts community in Northern Ireland, including; artists, arts and community workers, academics and participants. Harnessing elements of Paulo Freire’s values of co creation and Chantal Mouffe’s accommodation of agonism to reformulate and road test a pedagogy of dialogic participation, I will attempt to openly interrogate issues of context, complexity, integrity, authenticity and the construction of knowledge.
Bio: Sheelagh Colclough is a Northern Irish artist with a research based practice who has eighteen years of experience in participatory art. She completed a collaborative artists’ residency at Tyrone Guthrie Centre with The Performance Corporation, Ireland, 2015 and was artist-in-residence with IZOLYATSIA, Ukraine, 2016. Her co authored work has been published most recently in artWORK: Art, Labour and Activism, Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018 which combines a range of interdisciplinary research and practitioners’ perspectives on art practice and social movements. She is currently a PhD researcher at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University examining participatory art practices in Northern Ireland.
http://www.thesheelaghfoundation.com
Heather Connelly
Translation Zone(s): A Stuttering, Library of Birmingham 2016
Title: Art-and-translation in dialogue
Abstract: Heather takes the opportunity afforded by InDialogue to consider how dialogue operates within her own transdisciplinary artistic research project, Translation Zone(s), which is built upon the premise of translation as a dialogic practice. This will take a number of forms across all 3 days, including a presentation and discussion with Marianna Maruyama on Day 1 at Derby Theatre, a number of chaired sessions at Mansions of the Future and Nottingham contemporary, and finishing with a generative and reflexive discussion about what next on the final day
In this final session participants are invited to enter into a dialogue to attempt to consolidate some of the key strands/questions & issues that have emerged over the duration of the event – in the context of art, translation, intercultural communication & dialogue? Questions posed will include: how may we continue this dialogue through practice, research & publication etc. Whether it is possible to consolidate setting up a SiG, what should it do and how would this function? It will begin with a brief context/mapping of terrain and working in dialogue with Gaby Saldanah. Gaby will briefly discuss how working with art and artists has impacted upon her work and the field in general. Offering a brief response to what she has encountered at InDialogue.
Heather Connelly is co-founder and co-curator of InDialogue, artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln, who holds a PhD in Fine Art from Loughborough University. Her personal research concerns art-and-translation and linguistic hospitality and how art practice can be used to engage people in the complex issues of translation, language learning and more broadly transcultural communication. She established Translation Zone(s) in 2016, during a AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellowship at Birmingham City University, an arts research project that aims to encourage and facilitate transdisciplinary research in this field, devising works, curating events, panels and exhibitions nationally and internationally (EU & Asia). Translation Zone(s) has been the subject of a number of recent publications: Beyond representation: Translation Zone(s) and intersemiotic translation (2019) and Translation Zone(s): an experimental approach to linguistic hospitality (2018).
Connelly’s experimental, transdisciplinary approach to research and advocacy of the potential of artistic-led research in generating new ways of thinking about language and generating new knowledge within other disciplines.
http://www.heatherconnelly.co.uk/translationzones/
Cara Courage
Title: The museum as a relational object: considering the museum as civic agent
Abstract: This paper will consider the role and function of the museum as a relational and dialogical object, drawing on Tate Exchange as its case study. It will offer the museum as a civic space of plural and diverse knowledges, an agent for its publics to navigate their way through their lived experience. Framed through Bourriaud’s (1998) relational aesthetics and Kester’s (2004) dialogical aesthetic, the paper positions the museum as a relational (and dialogical) object, that functions as the relational art object: here the museum is cluster of artistic practices and learning pedagogies on a common trajectory that, via convivial modes of social exchange with the public are concerned with human interactions, social context and collective meaning making. Tate Exchange has created a platform within Tate for arts-led co-produced and participative knowledge creation with the public and transformed the institution’s relation to the public, to the civic, and to itself. Its socially engaged arts practice operates as a ‘social interstice’, a space that is located within an overarching system but that suggests other possibilities for exchanges within and without the museum, are concerned with provoking and sustaining individual and collective encounters. The paper will close with a set of key learnings of Tate Exchange practice that can be applied across the museum sector, as well as a roster of key provocations to changing museum’s critical capacity and civic potential.
Bio: Dr Cara Courage is a placemaking academic and practitioner, and Head of Tate Exchange, Tate’s space and programme dedicated to socially engaged art. Cara specialises in socially engaged art practice, her PhD focusing on this in the context of placemaking. She has a 20-year career in the arts largely working with museums and galleries, arts in the public realm and public engagement with the built environment. Cara is author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (Routledge, 2017), and the co-editor of Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018). Cara is also a Research Adjunct at University of Virginia and is a member of the Placemaking Leadership Council, Fellow of the RSA and Academician of Academy of Urbanism, and member of Royal Geographic Society and American Association of Geographers. More on her career and practice can be found at caracourage.net.
Chiara Dellerba
Title: The reason for domestic collectivism
Abstract: I will present FLAT5, a radical domestic art space where home narratives and conviviality are explored through the practice of collectivism and an open-source programme of activities. FLAT5 is a house in which to exhibit or collaborate find autonomy from institutional or market structures as well as a place where a dialogic approach is used to explore how we can shape the neighborhood and the surrounded area. Through discussing homemade aesthetics, DIY ethic we will explore the relationship between private and public, economies of sharing and the importance of collectivism as a mode to collaborate, interact and cooperate and an essential tool to re-think and influence the place where we live and work.
Bio: Chiara Dellerba is a visual artist and curator. She was born in Bari, where she graduated from the Politecnico in 2006. In 2009 she gained a Master in Design and Visual Art at the University of Venice. She is part of Politicized Practice Reseach Group at Loughborough University and co-founder of F-L-A-T- 5 an interdisciplinary domestic art space based in Nottingham. She is the founder of Zona Planetaria, a research-based residency programme in rural South Italy, focussed on promoting the politic of slow down and contemplation to stimulate practical reflections, conversation, provocation, self-care, and unproductivity as a practice of resistance again burn out.for She is currently part of the School of Civic Imagination at CCA in Glasgow. Between 2007 and 2019, her works have been exhibited in museums and art galleries across different countries: Marilena Bonomo gallery (Bari), Macro, la Pelanda (Rome), Alessandra Bonomo Gallery(Rome), Valentina Bonomo Gallery(Rome), Sara Zanin gallery (Rome), Onetwentyeight gallery ( New York), Kiyomiyamagishi (Nagano, Japan), Attenborough Arts Centre (Leicester), Mac (Birmingham), N_ Space (Nottingham), Surface Gallery (Nottingham), Radar Art Space (Loughborough University), New Art Exchange (Nottingham), 58th Venice Biennale (Venice).
Huw Davies and Philip Ranjit Basi
Title: Utran Conversations (2019, 25 min, 3-channel film)
Abstract: In response to the provocation Site-Location-Dialogue, this work is set against the backdrop of the annual Utran Kite Festival in Baroda, Gujarat State, India. The Festival celebrates the natural elements, marks the first day of the Hindu solar calendar and the beginning of the harvest cycle with the transition from winter to summer. Utran Conversations depicts the huge visual spectacle of the Festival and the kite itself as a symbol of high aspiration. It also explores important social and economic benefits. In binding together different communities and crossing religious divides as well as providing a complex infrastructure for the employment of thousands (of mainly homeworkers) engaged in the in the manufacture and distribution of kites and associated apparel. However, tensions also exist between the human presence and its intervention in the urban environment – disturbing the equilibrium and delicate balance of the natural ecosystem. The impact on wildlife is particularly severe and even human fatalities are reported from the glass coated ‘Chinese threads’ which are used in the kite flying and fighting rituals. Through the formal device of a multiple series of conversations and incorporating the participation of key players, the film explores these themes and issues against the documented background of Utran itself.
UTRAN CONVERSATIONS was supported by Artcore and the University of Derby’s Digital and Material Arts Research Centre and produced as part of an international artists’ residency at the Reliance Arts Centre, Baroda in January 2019.
Huw Davies is Professor of Lens Media at the University of Derby and Visiting Professor at Hebei University / UCLAN in Baoding, China. As a filmmaker, photographer and curator his work has included commissions for many national and international agencies, broadcasters and screened at festivals in competition in over 30 countries. He has an active involvement in a number of arts and cultural organizations previously having sat on the boards of QUAD and Derby Theatre, and is currently a trustee of UK Young Artists, Artcore and FORMAT International Photography Festival Steering Group. He founded and is Chair of Trustees of the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and was its Co-Artistic Director from 2004 – 2009.
Philip Ranjit Basi is a multi-award winning Series Producer / Director with over thirty years experience of professional works centred around music, arts, documentary, factual, and entertainment production. Having worked for both the ITV & the BBC, he has been responsible for thousands of hours of published TV from across the world. He is currently Programme Leader in Media Production at the University of Derby and believes that teaching and being active in the industry is the only way to keep pace with the ever-changing world of digital media production.
Marta Discepoli & Kirstie Jamieson
Title:Collaborative Disruption: Antagonistic Play within The Deaf Heritage Collective
Abstract: The arts are becoming increasingly integrated into applied linguistics research as scholarly attention turns towards multimodality, superdiversity (Adami 2017; Blackledge and Creese 2017) and co-production (McKay and Bradley 2016). Adding to this growing body of work, this paper reflects upon a collaborative project led by Edinburgh Napier University’s Critical Design team and Heriot-Watt University’s Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies. The two-year national project aimed to creatively advance discussion around the formal recognition of British Sign Language through the BSL (Scotland) Act 2015 and subsequent National Plan 2017-2023.
The paper describes the use of antagonistic props to generate new ways of thinking about the relationship between BSL and public life. Throughout four collaborative workshops, participants co-designed a model museum, life-size cardboard figures and BSL souvenirs. We discuss how these ‘boundary objects’ (Wenger 2000) revealed hidden, oppressed, and contradictory relations and how collaborative disruption can be understood as ‘mutually transformative’ (Back 2012).
Our paper argues that this curatorial approach to working with BSL users facilitated the disruption of conventional categories of heritage, Deafness and culture. We also argue that these disruptive acts played an integral role in materialising the experiential knowledge of participant-designers. These creative methods represent new modes of showing and telling that encourage playful inter-subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and uncertainty as positive values.
Bios:
Kirstie Jamieson (Deaf Heritage Collective, principal Investigator) Through a PhD I explored practices of curating heritage, temporary space and urban pageantry. Since the completion of my PhD I have co-led a Masters Programmes in Exhibition Design. My interests lie in the potential of design to develop a Critical Heritage that facilitates debate and reflexivity around identity and belonging. Working within the context of design and heritage I bring a knowledge of collaborative and creative methods to my research. By making, modelling and experimenting with objects and texts I enable discussion across deaf and hearing communities.
Marta Discepoli (Deaf Heritage Collective, Project administrator) Marta Discepoli is an artist facilitator currently working with the Deaf Heritage Collective as a researcher. Her background as a fine artist and environment graphic designer provides her with an approach that is experimental and visual. Marta has worked with the Deaf community in Italy and in Scotland.
https://www.deafheritagecollective.com/
Steve Dutton
Title: The possible impossible
Abstract: For the last decade I have been exploring artistic work which attempts to conflate and destabilise various ontological ‘norms’. Working primarily with text, image and speech the work hops between reading, writing, speaking, listening and seeing, effectively trying to create a new ‘noise’ which emerges from this mix of behavioural and semiotic classifications. The result, albeit from a form of dialogue between types, forms and /or realms, often results in a highly interiorised output, somewhere on the verges of solipsism and glossolalia. This application is to further test new outputs of this method in the context of a project which is all about dialogue and communication. This work seeks to withdraw from ‘meaningful dialogue’ in order attach meaning and agency to the notion of withdrawal itself. I would prefer to work in site or city I have not worked in before, hence working at Nottingham Contemporary, but I am open to other suggestions. It is impossible at this stage to identify what forms the work might take, but recent interventions have included performed texts, animated avatars and wall texts. Although the work concerns withdrawal from dialogue, it’s primary behavioural attribute would be to hide in plain sight, thus gallery spaces, corridor spaces are particularly of interest.
Bios: Steve Dutton is an artist and curator who works on both collaborative and individual projects. He is Head of Art and Director of the Art Research Centre at Bath Spa University in the UK. Alongside curatorial projects he is currently developing a new body work under the working title of “industry” which is including drawings, sound works, animations, objects and texts. Individual and collaborative projects have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, including The Stag and Hound at PSL in Leeds for which Dutton and Swindells were nominated for the prestigious Northern Art Prize. Alongside his practice as an artist has also curated a number of exhibitions including a major co-curated project ( with Brian Curtin ) for an exhibition for Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre, entitled ‘Possession’. His most recent curatorial collaboration is with Andrew Bracey, and is entitled, Midpointness.
http://www.axisweb.org/artist/stevedutton
Linda Duvall
Title: In the Hole and After.
Abstract: In the spring of 2017, I spent 6 hours a day in a 6-foot deep hole on Treaty 6 Indigenous land in rural Saskatchewan, Canada accompanied by one other person each day. Over 65 days in all weather, we talked, sang, moved, or just paid attention. Forty-five different people joined me from across Canada, US, Europe, Israel, and the Philippines. The premise of this residency was that new knowledge comes from the focused interaction of people with varying knowledge bases and perspectives. The site invited consideration of issues related to ecology, spirituality, history and agriculture, as well as more personal revelations. This hole became a site for conversation and contemplation. It was also about spending extended blocks of time surrounded by earth and sky, and with one other person. This project offers insights into the implications of siting a dialogue within a very specific location such as an isolated hole, as well as some of the consequences of defining an extended duration. Without other distractions, the nature of the dialogue was heavily shaped by aspects of the specific environment, by physical responses to the surrounding materials, and by the resulting sustained conversation over the 6 hours. I am proposing to examine the implications of developing a discursive project in such a visceral location, one that removed familiar distractions (no Internet) but that contained a painful embedded but invisible Indigenous/settler history. Areas of discussion will include the interrelations between site, context, and conversation. Other issues will include the complications around documentation, and the role of the initiating artist in such a durational project. I will accompany this talk with still images and/or video documentation.
Bio: Linda Duvall is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist who presents in gallery contexts, on the web, and within public and private spaces. Her work exists at the intersection of collaboration, intimate performances and research-in-action. Her hybrid practice addresses recurring themes of connection to place, grief and loss, and the many meanings of exclusion and absence. Duvall has completed degrees in Sociology and English (Carleton University) and Visual Arts (OCAD University, University of Michigan, Transart Institute). Her work has been presented in Guatemala, Ireland, Barcelona, Italy, Slovenia, Korea, China and across Canada. http://www.lindaduvall.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Duvall NB. I would attend all 3 days of the conference. Technical needs – projector If accepted, I would request support from Canadian sources.
Maria Georgoula
Title: The Portrait-Encomium
Abstract:The Encomium (working title) A reenacted excerpt from ‘Images’ an ancient dialogue by Lucian the Satirist Maria Georgoula Performers: Géraldine Whitfield & Maria Georgoula Dramaturgy: Géraldine Whitfield Costume/prop/sculpture: Maria Georgoula Duration: 12 minutes. YESThe project involves the adaptation of a short excerpt from a dialogue between Lycinus and Polystratus in Images written by the ancient satirist Lucian and brought in the context of the exhibition space while read and reenacted by two performers wearing a sculptural prop-costume which is currently being developed by the artist Maria Georgoula drawing from her own sculptural practice and research on the history of soft and inflated form in sculpture and theatre. The project will aim to explore how the qualities of exaggeration, excess and escalating narration may lead to the satirical absurd through different disciplines; the ancient dialogue (literature/theatre) and the wearable pro-sculpture (fine art). The ancient script and the aesthetics of the prop-sculpture would therefore be staged together in a gallery environment reinforcing the sculptural references in the dialogue and the prop, through a cross-disciplinary take. Images by Lucian/Synopsis In an attempt to describe the impressive beauty of Pantheia, a beautiful woman that Lycinus has just encountered, to his friend Polystratus, he begins to compose an ideal, as well as idealised, imagined portrait made out of his favourite parts from famous sculptures of the time. As the two friends chat, this absurd and impossible portrait becomes formed while Lycinus gives an account of a number of ancient sculptures and their features, leading to an imagined caricature as well as a journey through art history and art appreciation, exposing and ultimately satirising beauty and art ideals persistent through the legacy of the classical world through a humour that inflates and inevitably deflates.
Bio: Georgoula’s practice explores the absurd object and act as comical and psychoanalytical tools that expose the entanglements between the self and the material realm. Selected exhibitions and events include Tinos Quarry Platform, Greece; Kupfer, London; Daily Lazy Projects, Athens; Rogue Artists’ Project Space, Manchester; The Showroom, London; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Bloc Projects, Sheffield; the Delfina Foundation, London; Circuits & Currents, Athens; Remap, Athens; the Institute of Greek Contemporary Art, Athens; Six Dogs, Athens; Sanhe Museum, Hang Zhou, China; Southwark Playhouse, London and Sala Rekalde, Bilbao. Georgoula obtained a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She is currently Lecturer at the BA Fine Art course at Nottingham Trent University and Artist-in-Residence at Repton School in Derbyshire, UK. She lives and works in the Midlands, UK and Athens, Greece.
Hackett & Woodcock
Title: A Song for Derby
Abstract: A song for Derby is a performative intervention in the public domain occurring as an interactive walk between Derby Theatre and DEDA. Hackett and Woodcock will lead the attendees across the city centre from one venue to another. Using a call and response interactive format with participants, they will recite the artist name and titles of various pop songs. These songs will connect with themes of Language, Dialogue and with Derby as a place,( both in a literal and tangential sense) as well as other wider current references. Each artist will be unaware of the titles or sequence of delivery to spoken by the other. The intervention aims to balance the curious with the poignant along with a splash of absurdist humour. It will encode the sense of a quasi-functional activity akin to a political demo or public information announcement. This will interrupt the everyday and encode the format of the spoken word as a catalyst for protest and change. Once at DEDA the action will continue until 45 minutes has lapsed, the historic length of a Vinyl album. ‘A song for Derby’ is the latest collaborative public interruption between Tom Hackett and Julian Woodcock. They also collaborate on audio installations.
Bio:
Tom Hackett has made a wide range of interactive installations with venues including: Departure Lounge, Luton; The Collection, Lincoln; UH Galleries; Pitzhanger Manor Gallery, London; Northampton Museum & Art Gallery; FIRSTSITE, Colchester; MAC, Birmingham; Rugby Art gallery; Oriel Mostyn; and Edinburgh College of Art. He also exhibits internationally. As well as making art he lectures and writes reviews. His projects have been regularly supported by ACE funding.
Julian Woodcock works in various formats, his exhibitions include ‘Documentum’ Atlanta, ‘AUMD’ Karlesruhe, ‘fountain 17’ Hull, London & Stoke, DEDA Derby. Recent sound, music and live art events include; ALL Cambridge, KUNST, Belper, ‘The Eyes have it’ festival, ‘Ashleyhay’ festival and ‘Exile’festival. He is also a member of ‘Moon Bullet’ and ‘Early Human.
Johanna Hällsten
Title: Rupture & Flow
Abstract: Rupture & Flow (sound performance by Juxtavoices), The piece builds on previous works which explore and test cross-species communication and translation processes. This piece is part of a larger research project ‘Performing Hekla’ that explores different translation processes within music and voice performance, and is centred on Jón Leifs works that concern the Icelandic landscape and sagas. The first part of the work, Rupture, was performed in Iceland and this is a development of the work to extend and test the dialogic and translation processes at play. The new part, Flow, is a response to and continuation of Rupture. The piece centres on how animals in the local habitat of a volcano enter into a dialogue once an eruption is to take place and the aftermath of said event. The two parts explore how the animals enter into a series of calls and movements that respond to the volcanic disruptions, ending up in a series of dialogues. What is of interest is the futility of the translation process and dialogues between the choral voices, animal sounds, and environmental sounds. Yet in that futility there lays curiosity and hope, and a desire to try and understand the languages spoken by other species and our natural environment. The use of a choir, explores the dynamic of a shared voice whilst also being able to draw attention to the individual’s role in communicating as part of a symbiotic system.
Bio: Johanna Hällsten is a Swedish born artist now living in the UK. Working with text, sound and performance, Hällsten’s work focuses on translation between different cultures, species, and forms, to address the interrelation between sounds and environments, and the transience of the sound spaces created through movement. Attempting to give voice to phenomena we do not normally think of as having a voice, the work is usually site specific and produced in collaboration with organisations, institutions and professionals in other fields.
http://cargocollective.com/johannahallsten
Phil Harris
Title: A Profound Difference
Abstract: A Profound Difference is a collaborative project with young people, dealing with their attitudes towards the outcome of the UK referendum to leave the European Union. It is presented here in its 3rd iteration for InDialogue 2019, a few days after the agreed date to leave the EU, and features the responses of young Europeans studying in the UK.
The work plays with the physicality and delicacy of the image, captured and presented using obsolete media and equipment that has its origins in the ideas, beliefs and values of older generations. Just as the futures of a young generation were largely ignored within the debates and arguments of the referendum, so too this obsolete media renders these young people silent, with the sound of the voice replaced by the noise of projection equipment.
The footage is presented on loops of film that traverse the site of the installation, requiring the audience to negotiate the physical presence of media, apparatus and image.
Bio: Dr. Philip Harris is an academic and researcher at the University of Derby. His work explores the language of media in the representation of politics, identity and environment. He received his PhD in 2014 from BCU for a thesis on the philosophy of making and photography. He is currently programme leader for BA (Hons) Photography at the University of Derby.
Sarah Horton
Title: The Deviant Cloud: art out-of-place in the industrial work space
Abstract: Something of the potency of site-related artworks in the very public realm of outdoor spaces is well-rehearsed. However, the value of critical artwork in the enclosed and semi-private spaces of the industrial workplace is under-theorised and presents an opportunity for analysis in the same way that other public spaces have been scrutinised. This paper would present a body of work that was made for an industrial-scale laundry in England, UK as research for my practice-based Ph.D. These particular artworks employed the motif of a cloud and cloudscape, the repeated use of which was argued to form a metaphor for the repetition inherent in the laundry. The process of gaining access to the laundry also prompted a comparison between the work that the artist carries out and the work that typifies other labour. This is especially pertinent in an age of precarious employment and posed the question: can two dissimilar work practices be negotiated through the activity of placing artworks in the workplace? The extent to which the artist and artwork is out-of-place in these work environments was explored as a factor that was able to afford the artwork more potency. Similarly, my unique status of unbelonging was arguably my strength in this context.
Bio: Dr. Sarah Horton is an artist and lecturer. She has a BA Hons Visual Arts from Lancaster University, an MA Fine Art from Norwich University of the Arts (NUA) and a practice-based PhD from NUA/UAL. Her art practice includes sculpture, drawing and painting and is largely site-related. Her PhD, entitled ‘Decoration: Disrupting the workplace and challenging the work of art’ indicates an ongoing interest in the way pattern, decoration and ornament is used in fine art. She was Learning Co-ordinator for the Norwich leg of the British Art Show 8 and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Delpha Hudson
Title: In dialogue with {my}self
Abstract: This performative presentation will revisit the project Theatre of the Self (2017) which questioned the role and value placed on the construction of self through the use of narratives, and the role of the archive. A performative and dialogically engaged score was devised by me to read 30 personal diaries, that I had written between the ages of 14-44. Over a 3 month period, between June – August 2017, a single diary was read each day and burnt.
This process was documented by capturing an image of the diary, and of me reading from it. A final image was then taken to mark the burning of the diary. Fragments from the diaries were kept and during this performative talk I will revisit some of processual detritus.
The project deals with the notion of the historical construction of self, of stories that we create about ourselves, and how we deal with trauma.
I will look at the dialogic relationships that still co-exists between past and present practice. What are the threads that remain and still connect to my practice 3 years on?
This talk is an act of self-reflective practice. It also invites others to be in conversation with me, and my work. To this end, Theatre of the Self (2017)is an invitation to be in conversation, to talk about trauma, and what it means to rewrite the self.
More information:
http://wearewia.com/delpha-hudson-theatre-of-the-self/
Bio: Delpha Hudson is an artist based in Cornwall. She is currently a resident artist at Artcore, Derby (2019) ACE supported, commissioned to create a sculpture and sound installation; working title:Small Promethean Acts (2019-20).
She has previously worked as co-curator of Art Surgery creating site-specific performance projects in Cornwall A Sense of Place (1998) and TRACT (2006), produced video performance works that were shown around the UK and Europe (On the Margin, 2004), and was commissioned Tate St Ives for performance work Miss-Readings (2007). On-going projects that explore value, visibility and women’s mental health are How to go from one page to another and Domestic Dystopias.
Edmund Hunt
Title: Contemporary Music and Ancient Text: A Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue?
Abstract: Much of my work as a composer draws on early medieval literature, exploring the sounds and forms of untranslated early texts through the medium of contemporary musical composition. Following the completion of my PhD, my work has explored methodologies based on the idea of a creative dialogue between literature and music. Rather than simply ‘setting’ words to music, my work explores strategies in which music and text exist in a feedback system, whereby the form and sound of a text might lead to specific musical processes, which in turn allow salient characteristics of a text to be explored sonically. In developing artistic methodologies based on the idea of dialogue, several questions are raised. How might a composer avoid alienating the audience when a work is based on interaction between obscure or distant disciplines? When artistic practice draws on remote or unusual subject matter (such as untranslated ancient texts), what might be done to facilitate meaningful communication between the work and the audience? When answering these questions, the site of a musical performance can play a crucial role. For a composer, specific performance spaces can lead to the development of forms which seek to involve the audience in dialogic processes. However, the increasing prevalence of online recordings can mean that, for many audiences, the site at which engagement with music occurs is a virtual, metaphorical space rather than a concert hall. The complex interplay between site, form and dialogue in musical composition can offer many possibilities for the development of artistic practice.
Bio: Edmund Hunt is a Derbyshire based composer who writes instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music. In 2018, Edmund became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, focusing on the development of live electronics applied to composition for voice. Projects in 2018–19 have included an 18-minute choral work broadcast on BBC Radio 3, a composer-choreography residency under the direction of Robert Cohan, an electroacoustic piece for an art installation at the Research Centre for Biointerfaces at Malmö University, and collaborative work with Prof. Rajinder Dudrah (BCU School of Media) as part of the AHRC funded Creative Multilingualism project. In 2018, he was appointed the Royal Philharmonic Society/Wigmore Hall Apprentice Composer. In April 2018, he was selected to be part of Sound and Music’s ‘New Voices’, receiving funding and support to compose a work for string quartet, live electronics and dance in 2019–20.
Mark Jeffery
Atomr Rhinestone Cowboy;Photo credit: Grace Duval
Title: Unresting and Re-verbing – Panelist
Bio: Mark Jeffery is a Chicago based performance/installation artist, curator and Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1993 Mark Jeffery has developed unconventional collaborations with visual artists, scholars, video artists, sound artists, new media and code artists, dancers, choreographers, curators, and writers. In 2012, he co-founded the language, performance, and technology collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r). ATOM-r premiered its first work The Operature in 2014 and has recently premiered Kjell Theøry a performance and exhibition created through two residencies at The International Museum of Surgical Science and The Graham Foundation. He is organizer of the IN>TIME Tri Annual performance festival hosted by multiple venues in Chicago. (next edition will be in February of 2019.) Mark was a former member of the internationally renowned Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 – 2009. Recent performances and exhibitions include: Graham Foundation, Chicago, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Chisenhale Dance Space, London, Alfred De Vrove, Prague, International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, Performance Arcade, Wellington, NZ and 606 Trail, Chicago.
http://www.markjefferyartist.org/
Rhiannon Jones
Rhiannon Jones is an arts practitioner and resident artist at Primary Studios, Nottingham, UK (2012 – present). She is a Post-Doctoral Researcher for the Digital and Material Artistic Research Centre (DMARC), College of Arts at the University of Derby. She is the co-founder of InDialogue (2012 – present), a collaborative research project that explores the use of dialogue through artistic practice.
She is Chair of Cumulus International Contemporary Art Working Group, of which I have been a long standing and active member since 2012. She is a trustee of New Art Exchange, Nottingham and until very recently, was General Manager of Third Angel Theatre Company (NPO ACE portfolio), and Associate Lecturer at NTU in the school of Art and Design. She is a freelance mentor for the creative cultural sector working across the region and advisor to arts professionals and emerging artists.
She is creative director of S.H.E.D, which is currently touring nationally from summer 2019 – 22. She is also a member of Derby Cultural Strategy task and finishing group, DerbyCAN Steering group and Derby Theatre Research Group.
She has a PhD by practice entitled The Artistry of Conversation which looked at the performative and tactile nature of Conversation (Nottingham Trent University, 2016). Her research continues to be focused on the artistic and spatial curation of conversation, and the design of dialogue within the arts.
In parallel to this activity she is co-editing a publication about S.H.E.D: a literal and metaphorical mode for transforming spaces for cultural, social and political discourse. She has a forthcoming chapter with Intellect on Intellect Playtext Series – The Trilogy: Acts of Dramaturgy (2020) and article with Performance Research Journal On Wreckage (2019).
https://theartistryofconversation.com/s-h-e-d/
hancock & kelly
hancock & kelly are InDialogue Artists in Residents 2019, they will be developing their performance, An Extraordinary Rendition for Nottingham Contemporary and participating in a panel Unresting and Re-verbing, regarding this work. Further information about the residency and the panel can be found by clicking on the embedded links or menu tabs .
hancock & kelly is the collaborative project of artists Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly. Since 2001, they have collaborated on a series of works questioning and provoking the gaps between subjects.
Through an internationally acclaimed body of work spanning performance, choreography, video, photography, installation, and text, they have continually asked questions of where the limits of the body may be drawn, and separated from the knowledge and questions with which they are enmeshed. Issues of materiality, value, and embodied knowledge have been pivotal to the complex critical and aesthetic dialogues they undertake. The resulting pieces have been a series of visceral and queer encounters.
hancock & kelly have performed and exhibited at venues and events such as The Cultural Center Chicago, USA (2019); The 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Russia (2015); The National Review of Live Art, UK (2005, 2007, 2009); Performance Space, Australia (2007); Museu de Évora, Portugal (2009).
https://www.hancockandkelly.com/
Jennie Klein
Title: Unresting and Re-verbing – Panel moderator
Jennie Klein is an art historian who writes on contemporary art, performance art and the intersection of gender and visual culture. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1998.
Dr. Klein is presently completing two book projects. The first Responding to Site and co-edited with Dr. Natalie Loveless and under contract with Intellect Press, is an edited collection on the work of the artist Marilyn Arsem. It will be available in Spring 2020. The second, Assuming the Ecosexual Position, under contract with the University of Minnesota Press, is a compiliation of the work and writing of Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens. Dr. Klein has published in PAJ, Frontiers, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Feminist Studies, N. Paradoxa, ArtPulse, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Genders, and Afterimage. Dr. Klein also has a blog: “Writing On Performance” http://jenniekleinperformancewriting.blogspot.com/.
Dr. Klein teaches courses on contemporary art and theory, performance art and theory, and the intersection of gender and art. In addition to these courses, she serves as the Director of Studies for the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University.
https://www.ohio.edu/fine-arts/kleinj1
Nicholas Lowe
Nicholas Lowe. After James Wilkins: Twelve Overland Trail Landscapes, (objects series) 2018. 1 The Confluence of The Platte and Missouri Rivers. Slip-cast industrial porcelain, Kohler Arts/Industry Program 2018 (Photo: Kohler Beacon)
Title: Unresting and Re-verbing – Panelist
Bio: Nicholas Lowe is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, author and teacher. His most recent curatorial project the exhibition and performance series, ‘goat island archive – we have discovered the performance by making it’, was at Chicago’s Cultural Center. Reviewed as ‘fresh’ and ‘visionary’, noted for the ways particular attention was paid to creating a level field of access, offering material and content through a series of meticulously pragmatic displays and live experiments. In both his curatorial and visual work Lowe actively questions established museum structures, categorization methods and subject hierarchies. His visual and performance works grow and develop through related thinking as research based iterative practices. His studio-based experiments and material outcomes include works on paper, slip-cast industrial porcelain, video, and performance. Recent works were featured by the Kohler Foundation at the 2018 Expo-Chicago, and was also exhibited at the SAIC Sullivan Galleries, and performed at Ohklahomo in Chicago.
https://www.behance.net/Nicholas_Lowe
Hamish Macpherson
Title: Metaform
Abstract:Metaform is a practice for small groups to tune into the mindbody mesh that connects them. A mindbody mesh is produced through the thoughts, gestures and speech of a group of people. It could be thought of as a collective unconsciousness but it is not a singular mind (everyone will have a different perception of it) and it is also held in the bodies of the people and we aren’t always aware of what our bodies know. Such meshes cannot be discerned precisely or clearly but you can trust that you are connecting to it through your different senses and awarenesses. Led by the reader, participants use the Metaform deck of cards and Metaform blocks to find different ways to tune into this mesh. There is no need to analyse the experience beyond what is suggested through the deck.
Referencing Ouija boards, Frederich Froebel’s gifts and conceptual metaphor theory, Metaform guides participants through a particular kind of conversation create new metaphors which to think and talk about big ideas. Participants use the Metaform deck of cards and Metaform blocks to think and talk about big ideas in simple, physical ways. Cards are used to reveal a ‘centring’ word (from ‘Awe’ to ‘Utopia’) and the group arranged some or all of the blocks in response to this word. Cards are also used to guide the group’s dialogue (for example ‘work in silence’ or ‘think of it as a dance’). These methods avoid anyone taking a constant lead and create room for different voices and different kinds of contribution. This is useful for any group dynamic which will may have it’s own established dynamics and hierarchies. Readings for three to seven people at a time will be carried out throughout the day, each taking between 15 and 30 minutes.
Bio: Hamish MacPherson is a London-based choreographer and researcher. He use performances, workshops, larps, games and other things to create environments for people to think, learn and be together. These structures are often decentralised and self-organising, combining physical activity and conversation and have dealt with themes like somatic citizenship, resentment, care and the future. He has an MRes in Choreography and Performance from Roehampton University and an MA in Human Values and Global Ethics form King’s College, London. Hamish has presented such work in art spaces (inc. Tate Britain, ICA, Somerset House, Catalyst Arts Belfast, Open School East, Camden People’s Theatre, Chisenhale Dance Space, Cambridge Junction, Showroom Gallery), festivals (SPILL, SLAP, Swallowsfeet); libraries; and higher education institutions (inc. Birkbeck College, Roehampton University, Coventry University, Universiteit voor Humanistiek).
Gemma Marmalade
Title: Function Function
Abstract: Function Function is a performance presented through the public address ‘Tannoy’ system at Deda for the Indialogue19 evening social event.
At intervals, typically institutional public information, combined with instructional guidance for visitors regarding proceedings for the event will be announced. This scripted content has been pre-performed through a process of digital speech-to-text dictation with a mimicking of verbal stylistics commonplace in corporate announcements. The inflections, exaggerations and vocal tonality along with the limitations of the technology partially obscure the content and skew the algorithmic interpretation to form new and seemingly recalcitrant language. The new dialogue is re-presented live in its unedited reconfigurment.
Bio: I am a British artist and academic specialising in photography, video and performance-based works. My practice playfully negotiates the authenticity of history, science and sexual politics. I have exhibited widely, including Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; The Apulia Film Commission, Bari; and the State Museum of Gulag, Moscow. With an active research practice, regularly participating in international symposia and conferences on contemporary art debate, I am a Senior Lecturer in Photography currently undertaking doctoral research titled: In A Manner of Speaking: The Subversive Voice in Performative Art at the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University.
Marianna Maruyama
Title: Permissions AKA Loving with Both Hands
Abstract:Permissions AKA Loving with Both Hands is an interdisciplinary work by artist Marianna Maruyama. Video, music, text and mobile phone technology are the formal components of this piece made in close collaboration with programmer and sound artist Yiannis Tsirikoglou, video artist Ieva Kotryna Skirmantaite, sound artist Andrius Arutiunian, and the data studies scholars at Utrecht Data School. One of the aims of Permissions is to increase visibility around privacy issues and the implications of data harvesting that happen whenever smartphones are being used. For Maruyama, smartphones can also be (audio) speakers that can help tell a story, anywhere, anytime. The fact that these speakers are regularly situated on or near the body is a thread that ties this project to her past performance work dealing with the body. Permissions is also centered on gender roles, as well as the split between the public and private, and an always newly forming relationship with technological development. Permissions officially premieres at IMPAKT festival in Utrecht, October 31, 2019 with a special preview run at Utrecht Centraal Museum on Oct. 3. Permissions AKA Loving with Both Hands is generously supported by The Creative Industries Fund NL, The Mondriaan Fund, and Stroom Den Haag.
Bio: Marianna Maruyama works with the body and voice as primary agents in her practice. She uses translation as an artistic method to reveal the complexity of multilingualism, interpreted to encompass not only verbal language, but also culture, image, sound, and movement. She has tutored at the Dutch Art Institute, guest lectured at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, and is an artist-researcher at the invitation of the Sedje Hémon Foundation in The Hague. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), The Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam (NL), Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2018 (NL), Manifesta 11 (CH), and documenta14 Parliament of Bodies (DE). Selected publications include: Performing Security (The Fifth Season, 2019); Farocki’s Living Room (Harun Farocki Institut, 2018); Translation as Method (Kunstlicht, 2017), Three Movements (Casco/DAI, 2013).
http://www.mariannamaruyama.com
; a place, of their own.
Title : The Eile Project
Abstract: Borders are more than lines on a map, they are social facts that are used to divide and rule people. Balibar (1998) explores how borders have increased surveillance outside and inside sovereign states, and have become ubiquitous. Anzaldúa (1987) explores borders beyond the spectacle or as external places, but as crossing bodies, as internal. Furthermore, as humans are faced with, and grapple with, the complex links between climate catastrophe, globalised capitalism, continued war and mass migration there has been a concomitant increase in nation-state borders. The tyranny of borders thus continues and hardens to restrict access to secure work, to put people at risk of mortal danger as they flee unimaginable horrors. They stop those seeking a better life, or from joining their family who have already migrated. It follows then that borders affect people differently, for as Anzaldúa (1987) reminds us, “We don’t cross borders, borders cross us.” It also follows that as we are faced with increasingly unpredictable futures, borders will continue to shift new border technologies will devised, and more bodies will become illegal.
So, questions need to be asked? How can we not talk about borders? How can we not think and have conversations about what they mean for us? Who decides which human bodies are legal and which are not? What do you think about biometric surveillance? How can we have freedom of movement for some and not for others? Why are people risking lives to cross the sea; and how has this become normalised? Should your birthplace or wealth determine your right to cross nation-state borders? How have borders changed for you? Why might borders change for you in the future? Why do we have borders? Who do they protect, who do they serve? What is your experience of borders?
Bio: ; a place, of their own. is the art+spatial research practice of Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy. Through art and spatial practice, we interrogate and propose within entanglements of climate, capital, technology and politics. We operate as a collective, a couple, with our children, and through collaborations with others. Our projects explore the transformative potential of art and spatial practice to suggest other worlds yet to become; they are becomings enacted through collaboration, by asking questions, provoking dialogue and testing ideas, and try to prise the production of subjectivity and the radical imagination back from the grip of neoliberal forces. Sam is an architectural researcher/pedagogue and artist, currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Sheffield Hallam University. Paula is an artist/researcher/pedagogue currently Researcher, School of Arts, Digital & Material Research Cluster, Derby University.
Neil Maycroft & Jim Shorthose
Title: InDialogue and the Public Realm – A discussion about what next?
Chair: Rhiannon Pinchbeck
Abstract: Participants are invited to enter into a dialogue and reflect upon some of the key strands/questions & issues that have emerged over the duration of the event – in the context of working within the public realm? Questions posed will include: how may we continue this dialogue through practice, research & publication etc. What are the particular issues around Dialogue as Site and form that are pertinent interrogate further? How can artists engage in/with/or contribute to Higher Education Institutions Civic and Cultural agendas? and what are the opportunities and challenges of taking this forward? This session will be led by Neil Maycroft & Jim Shorthose, University of Lincoln and chaired by InDialogue cofounder and curator Rhiannon Pinchbeck with a brief presentation by Kerry Campbell, Artistic Director of Mansions of the Future.
Bio: Neil Maycroft is a social scientist, specialising in social and cultural theory, who has taught in art and design schools for the past twenty-five years in both classroom and studio. He is currently Reader in Design Studies and Director of Research in the Lincoln School of Design, University of Lincoln. His research takes two paths. The first explores the material culture of waste, discard, obsolescence and ambiguous matter. The second investigates creativity and creative practice especially in terms of design thinking and pedagogy. His most recent publication, with co-contributor to this volume Jim Shorthose, is Where is cre-ativity; a multi-disciplinary approach (Routledge, Oxford, 2017).
Bio: Jim Shorthose is a senior lecturer in the School of Design at the University of Lincoln. His teaching focusses on contextual studies for designers; theories of creativity and the development of a reflective creative practice; and issues pertaining to professional development for designers in the creative industries. His research interests include a concern with the potential role of cultural organisations in spreading opportunities for creativity. In recent years this has led to the publication of the book Where is Creativity?: A Multi-disciplinary Account (2017, Routledge); and the articles Teaching Creativity? (2018, IMPact); Dialogical Value for Cultural Organisations (2019, the Journal of Creative Communication); and Work, Wellbeing and Creativity; The Role of Social Infrastructure (2019, the International Journal of Innovation, Culture and Change).
Andrea Milde
Title: Linguistics in the Arts: Collaborative artistic communication processes
Abstract: In this paper I will explore the following questions: What are people doing when they are jointly engaging in creative and artistic activities? What are the features of their working processes? Processes in the arts such as in rehearsals, studio work, and so on, are complex and rely on the spoken communication between the participants (such as set designers, illustrators, writers and performance artists). The research focus in the arts often lies on the end-product rather than on the process, e.g. in the rehearsal space or in the studio, during which the piece is being developed. In this paper I will present the general approach and method I have developed for analysing talk in collaborative artistic working processes that involve two or more people. I will explain how it can be applied in the various fields of communication in creative and artistic working processes. This method allows me to break down talk in creative and artistic processes into phases and analyse them using linguistic-communicative categories. In order to demonstrate my approach, I will show video-clips from my fieldwork that I produced during the studio working process of the Haranczak/Navarre Performance Project Control Signal. I will also show extracts of the transcribed talk between the artistic director, sound designer, set designer, and projection designer during the Tamasha Theatre production process of The Arrival.
Bio: Andrea Milde (PhD) is a rehearsal researcher, applied linguist, and ethnographer at the interface of spoken communication and the arts, with expertise in the field of conversations in rehearsals, performance and other artistic creative processes. She is Lecturer in German in the Department of History, Languages and Global Cultures at Nottingham Trent University. She also taught her research on the MA Education in the Arts and Cultural Settings at King’s College London for six years. She worked as a consultant for linguistics in drama and makes short ethnographic documentary films on communication in drama practice.
Nadya Monfrinoli & Robin Williamson
Title: Continuity
Abstract: Robin Williamson and Nadya Monfrinoli are embarking on a new collaboration to produce a series of ephemeral site-specific and interactive installations combining their two current practices, the first being shown at the Collection, Lincoln, in May 2019. Through the use of conductive tape to make her drawings, Monfrinoli is creating part of the electric circuit that is needed to power Williamson’s tiny machine, which in turn needs the joining of several hands to span the large space between two drawings. By touching them at the same time, the circuit is completed, enabling the machine (creating an etching plate, a drawing, light or music) to come alive. This inter-dependency of artists on each other and on the audience is where the dialogue between them happens. At times, the effort required to elicit such a small change will seem colossal and the action absurd, but the humour in the resulting action is the reward. The ambition for this new body of work is that the viewer is explicitly involved through group cooperation in completing the circuit – literally as well as figuratively – to release the artwork. In due course, Williamson and Monfrinoli are keen for other artists to be involved in further chain reactions and there may be scope for this within this project. The proposal for InDialogue does not depend on a single specific site but would respond to one (or more) allocated through the project. Ideally though, the work is best suited to a ground floor indoor space with a large window to attract passing subjects since the work cannot exist without the involvement of several people who will need direct access to it throughout the three days.
Bios: Williamson creates magical moments in movement and sound; small kinetic wonders whose visible circuitry allow the viewer to marvel at their precarious ingenuity and whose interaction alter their behaviour. Monfrinoli makes work which is often site-specific, site-responsive and relational, either in its conception, its realisation or experientially. Often, it is ephemeral and lately she has been creating large-scale drawings using tape on windows which play with the dualities of light and shadow, inner and outer spaces, night and day. The new collaboration is a merging of this work.
https://www.instagram.com/robinwilliamsonart/
Annie Morrad & Andrew Bracey
Title: Latent Image – Latent Sound
Abstract: This paper will be a dialogue between three languages; music, painting and text, specifically through digital painting, saxophone playing, performative activity, written text, spoken text and international languages. We are interested in the coming together of fundamentally different approaches to language. This planned improvised encounter encourages a shunting, slippage or collage to arise; giving opportunities to acknowledge common and distinct dialogues. There is a co-production between musician and instrument: the saxophone needs the saxophonist to make a sound, and vice versa. There is a co-production between painter and the history of their medium, each requires the other. The saxophonist does not make images; the painter does not make sounds, together they create a space that allows for both to be in accord and discord simultaneously. The saxophonist produces music made in response and non-response to the painter, and vice versa. The saxophonist and painter both read, write and give voice to text; a shared language. This interrelationship is generating a different language form, constructed through and between three distinct ‘voices’ (music, painting and text). We are interested in adopting a parasitical and symbiotic approach to dialogical exchange, with an aim of provoking new types of knowledge through artistic research. We want to expose the presentation in a site with an attentive audience in a city that is not our home or workplace in order to elicit new possibilities for the dialogue between us. The live audience will observe the practitioners interacting with and between each other’s practices. Bracey will digitally alter a reproduction of an iconic painting (his voice); Morrad will play saxophone (her voice); A co-authored text will form the third part of the dialogue (their voice). The live audience will switch from observers to participants through the action of the Q&A, which will be a two-way process.
Bios: Annie Morrad biography. Morrad is a lecturer and sound artist, who uses improvisation with live alto and tenor saxophones to create experiential and experimental collaborations. Recent presentation of research at Performance Writing Conference Wellington, New Zealand, March 2017 and every month on Wave Farm Radio, NYC.
http://annie-morrad-soudandimage.com
Andrew Bracey is an artist based in Waddington, England. He studied fine art at Liverpool John Moores and Manchester Metropolitan Universities. He has exhibited extensively with solo exhibitions including Usher Gallery, Lincoln (2014/5); Nottingham Castle (2014/5), Manchester Art Gallery (2009); Transition Gallery, London (2007) and firstsite, Colchester (2006). Exhibitions he has curated include (detail) (2014/5) at H-Project Space, Bangkok and touring; Misdirect Movies (2013), Royal Standard, Liverpool, and touring; and Unspooling: Artists & Cinema (2010), Cornerhouse, Manchester. He is currently Programme Leader of MA Fine Art at The University of Lincoln, England.
Susanne Palzer
Title: Twelve Months Notice
Abstract: Position Paper – The UK’s decision in 2016 to leave the EU is affecting all parts of life and for many it is an ongoing source of uncertainty bordering on the unbearable. The arts are international and countless artist’s lives depend on free movement. A large number of artists reside or work in a country that is not their country of origin. In this context artist’s practices have been affected in a myriad of ways, from the practical to the personal. As the question of a future framework is still unresolved, livelihoods and residences are in question and this has created an unacceptable in limbo situation for nearly three years now. My proposed Position Paper will attempt to outline how this situation has affected my own practice as an EU27 artist based in the UK. It will introduce Twelve Months Notice: a project I initiated in March 2018 to find ways to negotiate this impossible situation – at a point when to continue my practice as before became impossible. Practice has become a site for ongoing existential dialogue asking what practice can be now, what form it can take and where it can be located, now and in the future. Over the past year this search for adequate forms and expressions has experimented with different media including performance, photography, writing, sharing events and conversations. Looking for ways to communicate has also led to dialogue and collaboration beyond the purely personal. There have also been periods of creative arrest when practice seemed not possible. TMN will come to an end in March 2019 but the dialogue will need to be continued. It is an ongoing process.
Bio: Susanne Palzer is a cross-disciplinary artist, performer and independent researcher who grew up in Germany, not far from Schengen, Luxembourg. She has a long-standing relationship with the UK since the age of 13 and has been based in Sheffield since 1999. Susanne Palzer’s main practice investigates the intersection of digital and analogue forms, in particular the fusion of digital technology and physical performance. However, political circumstances impacting on the personal over the past three years have forced her into an ongoing existential dialogue with her art practice. In March 2018 she initiated Twelve Months Notice to negotiate the situation she found herself in. Susanne Palzer is also the curator of OPENPLATFORM/RAP(s)-TwT., and a co-director at Access Space, Sheffield.
www.facebook.com/RandomAccessLife/
https://arandomprocessexperiment.blogspot.com/open-platform.html
Rachel Parry
Title: Performing Alchemy
Abstract: “Performing Alchemy” is an artist-led lab bringing together methodologies to lead participants in devising lived-body based performance art. Led by artist Rachel Parry, who utilises and embraces individual and collective awkward displacement, their everyday miscommunications in creation of body-based provocations. Processes originally emerged during the reflecting of personal in/visible disabilities, including neurodivergent mal/functions as words spilled out illogically. It evolved from regarding sticky residues of their trauma, inside ecologies of artists’ care during making challenging art and what happens to the art during the processes of healing?
Bio: Rachel Parry is an interdisciplinary artist predominantly working in Live Art and Performance, visual and sound practices. Their practice is currently exploring new technology innovations as a part of NEARNOW. Rachel is Artistic Director and Curator of LittleWolfParade Live Art Platform. (www.littlewolfparade.com) . GuerillArtLab an intuitive created to support artist practices and explore models of developing practice, care and support. GAL Collective emerged out of the processes of this; forming individual artist development, peer group activity and gallery takeovers. GAL on a whole is embracing of otherness, intersectional feminist minded and queer.
http://www.galcollective.co.uk;
https://www.instagram.com/guerillartlab;
https://www.instagram.com/rachelparryartist/
Xristina Penna
Title: To You <-> To Me
Abstract: In the project ‘To You, To You, To You: Love Letters to a (Post) Europe’, artist/curator Lisa Alexander invited artists to respond to a provocation including the phrase to ‘gather and to respond with the action, idea or form of a love letter’. As one of the invited artists, my immediate response to the provocation was to create a scenography asking from the audience to perform an unconditional act of love towards me, the performer on stage. The scenographic action therefore ‘To You <-> To Me’ uses cord, fabric, and trust, to acknowledge my need to be lifted and supported as a European citizen living in the UK during this national fragile and precarious historical moment in time. I will use a handmade bizarre object, inefficient aesthetics and audience participation to create a collaborative action-dialogue using my method of the ‘scenographic contraption’ (Penna, 2013). The revealing nature of the contraption does not attempt to hide or disguise its malfunctions, its precarious nature and exposes in turn the artist-scenographer-inventor who made it. This exposure is an invitation to a dialogue-as-practice where the audience are invited to contribute critically, to judge, observe, participate, collaborate, conspire, make their own stories, and allow themselves to be exposed. My invitation stresses the political importance of a non-egocentric responsiveness to this precarious historical moment following Varela et al.’s enactivist call of ‘acknowledging the other with whom we dependently cooriginate’ (Varela et al. 1991: 254).
Bio: Dr Christina (Xristina) Penna is an artist/scenographer, researcher and lecturer; currently Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Costume and Set Design, University of Derby. She has worked as a designer for plays, devised and site-specific performances, and events (www.xristinapenna.com). Since 2009 she works with mixed-media, handmade bizarre objects, inefficient aesthetics and material stemming from the audience to create hybrid collaborative performance installations and actions, which she calls ‘scenographic contraptions’ (www.aswespeakproject.org ). Her practice-research tests how participatory performance processes can be informed by neuroscience theories of human consciousness and cognition to facilitate collaborative thinking through audiences, space and materials. She has presented her research in a number of national and international conferences (IFTR, The Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities, ISTR). Her work has appeared at Currents 2013, USA | The Bluecoat, Liverpool | The Benaki Museum, Athens | Shunt Vaults, London |The Roundhouse, London.
https://stagingplaces.co.uk/designers/xristina-penna/
Pinchbeck & Smith
Abstract: In 2020, writers and theatre-makers, Pinchbeck & Smith, will make a new show inspired by A Seventh Man, the 1975 book about migration by John Berger and Jean Mohr. Using verbatim interviews and photography the performance is part slideshow, part documentary, part adaptation, and explores and explodes the book to mark its 45th anniversary. The narrative follows workers leaving home, crossing borders and facing questions about the work they do and taking medical tests to see if they are fit enough. The cast read directly from Berger’s book as if both narrating and acting out its portraits of a generation of young men who travel across a continent in search of a better life. The piece tells the story of how the book came to be using words and images of Berger and Mohr following a three act structure: Departure, Work, Return. It tells the story of what happened to the migrants after it was published. It asks what has changed in the years since its publication. It draws a map of the world charting journeys that migrant workers make in the book across a European landscape that is no longer recognisable and before Brexit. For InDialogue, Pinchbeck & Smith share early work-in-progress in S.H.E.D for a limited audience. Supported by Arts Council England, the project is commissioned by Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, New Perspectives and Nottingham Playhouse.
Michael Pinchbeck is a writer and theatre-maker based in Nottingham. He studied Theatre and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and has an MA in Performance and Live Art from Nottingham Trent University. He completed a PhD at Loughborough University exploring the role of the dramaturg in contemporary performance. He is an Associate Professor in Drama at the University of Lincoln where he is joint MA Theatre Programme Leader. He was commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse to write The White Album (2006), The Ashes (2011) and Bolero (2014), which toured to Kosovo and Bosnia & Herzegovina. www.michaelpinchbeck.co.uk
Ollie Smith is a theatre-maker, writer and dramaturg based in Nottingham. He studied Acting at Bretton Hall (University of Leeds). He is an Associate Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at De Montfort University (Leicester) and the University of Lincoln. He is one half of the creative partnership LaPelle’s Factory, which is company-in-residence at Attenborough Arts Centre (Leicester), and supported by In Good Company. His approach to theatre and performancemaking is multidisciplinary and imbued with playful irreverence and dark humour. www.ollie-smith.com
Pinchbeck & Smith have created several performances together over the last 10 years including The End (2010), The Beginning (2012), Bolero (2014), The Trilogy (2015), Concerto (2016) and Solo (2018).
Neil Powell
Title: Territory; the Exhibition in a Box
Abstract: The Created and Contested Territories Group have used conflict theory to create ‘Territory; the Exhibition in a Box’. The vehicle unites disparate creative practitioners to emphasize a materialist and materialized interpretations of history. The group, consisting of artists, historians, designers, architects and writers, has adopted a critical stance toward past social arrangements, and by implication, contemporary representations of ‘reform’ as embodied by territorial, conceptual or societal change. The form of the exhibition in a Box is elastic, it can remain in the box or be mounted as an exhibition or distributed event. Its compressed, multidisciplinary form facilitates interdisciplinary and multisite, multinational dialogues around citizenship, immigration, nationalism and contemporary types of conflict. The dialogues are visual, tactile and spoken and they embrace a range of cognate disciplines and perceptions about site and identity. The Box is accompanied by one or two narrators, and encounters are recorded. The Box can be added to and augmented within the parameters of the brief. What is the dialogic relationship between site and form? The Boxed exhibition (an edition of 10) itself is a vehicle to create dialogue, and its sites and related symposia include: IMPACT 10 Printmaking Conference, Santander, Spain (Sept 2018) Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (February 2020) Haus am Lützowplatz (HAL), Berlin (March 2020) CLB, Berlin (May 2019) Lust and Apple, Edinburgh (March 2018) Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) Library, London (January 2020) Sight Marmetei, Former Stasi Prison, Romania. (December 2019) Former Stasi Records Agency, Leipzig (February 2020) ‘Territory; the Exhibition in a Box’, draws attention to power differentials; differentials made manifest by class, geopolitical or aesthetic conflict. This conceptual framework has served to determine the approach to contrast historically dominant ideologies and their archetypal locations, with pointed, site-specific interventions.
Bio: Powell writes a monthly column on arts and culture for Wall Street International, is a guest columnist for Arts and Museum Magazine and was recently commissioned to write a piece on Luciano Fabro for the The Brooklyn Rail. He has made numerous appearances on BBC and ITV television and BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. His work features in the Imago Mundi – Art Theorema #1 exhibition, at Salone degli Incanti in Trieste, Italy (2018), and he is currently working on a major exhibition project with the artist, Claudio Parmiggiani and will curate an exhibition featuring the work of the late Sir Anthony Caro, Iron in the Soul, to open in May 2019 to coincide with the Norfolk and Norwich Festival.
Assunta Ruocco
Title: How things work. Spaces that foster artistic dialogue, and the labour of maintenance.
Abstract: A short presentation about two spaces that nurture dialogue around the processes of production of art, drawing on interviews with photography bookshop owner Andrea Copetti (Tipi Bookshop, Brussels https://tipi-bookshop.be) and Sam Basu, of Treignac Projet, an exhibition and workshop project situated in the Limousin region of France (http://www.treignacprojet.org/artistsprogram/ArtistsFrameset.html). Andrea Copetti has been running a bookshop in the popular neighbourhood of St. Gilles, for the past 5 years. He took over a former anarchist bookshop and retained all the original fittings. He filled it with photographers’ self-published books, and the bookshop became a site that those interested in photography could inhabit, fostering a community maintained by Copetti through his daily presence and conversation, but also, providing a place where photographers come to seek advice about their book projects in the making. Copetti has recently created a workshop space at the back of the bookshop where photographers and artists can work together and make books collaboratively, and engage in dialogue with their peers. Sam Basu and Liz Murray started Treignac Project in 2007. The site is a former textile factory in the village of Treignac, and part of it is a ruin. And yet over the past decade Treignac has hosted a great number of exhibitions and workshops, involving groups of people coming together to work around a theme of common interest, from artists to theoreticians to musicians. Basu hosts and participates in some of the workshops. The reproductive, intellectual and affective labour of hosting runs parallel to the work of maintaining the ruin, renovating parts of it and preventing further decay. What is the relationship between the capacity of these sites to foster dialogue and create communities, and the work of those who look after them and maintain them?
Bio: Assunta Ruocco is an artist based in Nottingham, UK. Recent exhibitions include Co-Working with Things, solo exhibition curated by David Bell at Martin Hall Exhibition Space, Loughborough (2018), Heterarchical Archipelago, group exhibition by c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e at Art Brussels Contemporary Art Fair (2015). Forthcoming in November 2019 is Our Days of Gold, solo exhibition at Hamburg Italian Cultural Institute. She has recently completed a practice based PhD at Loughborough University’s School of Art English and Drama. Her research project is entitled: ‘Co-Working with Things. How Furnished Spaces Contribute to the Emergence of Artworks’, and focuses on our relationships with the spaces that we inhabit and work in as artists. She examines both the work that things do, when they are arranged as furnished spaces such as homes, studios, workshops; and the reproductive work involved in furnishing working spaces and maintaining them.
Deniz Soezen
Title: Un-doing belonging: opacity as artistic strategy
Abstract: In response to the provocations posed for a ‘Site-Practice-Dialogue’, this paper proposes to explore the Glissantian (1990) concepts of opacity and multilingualism as a strategy to destabilise fixed notions of belonging and identity and challenge the universal standardisation of Anglo-American English in contemporary art. Departing from my practice-based research ‘The Art of Un-belonging’, the paper will consider three discrete yet interrelated artworks that set out to question binary conceptions of self and Other to undo fixed notions of belonging and identity. The multilingual video-performance Surya Namaz (2018) is a personal investigation of yoga and namaz, the Muslim prayer ritual, exploring the potential of transcultural performance, opacity and multilingualism to challenge fixed notions of belonging. Kahvehane Kongresspark (2016), a temporary café, ceramic cups/saucers and performance in the public space and Trans Plantations (2018), an installation of cups/saucers and coffee beans cast in porcelain in combination with an audio-visual element, are concerned with the colonial history of and human entanglements with coffee, taking the exploration of belonging beyond the anthropocentric. Crucially, all three artworks of the triad involve an element of language, translation and multilingualism. Translation as one of the artforms which following Glissant (1996, p45) inscribes the multiplicity of the world is key to my practice. The paper argues that rendering the diversity (of languages and by extension difference) audible, visible and/or legible in contemporary (diasporic) art practice is key, if we want to generate a shift in the audiences’ mono-cultural/lingual imaginary. Although I consider my practice to be transdisciplinary in nature, I would say that it situates itself within the realm of visual arts. Therefore, Nottingham Contemporary seemed to be the most appropriate context to present my practice-based research (but I would be happy to discuss alternative options, if selected).
Bio: I studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and at Goldsmiths, University of London. I am currently completing a practice-based PhD at CREAM, University of Westminster, London. My work has been shown in various contexts internationally. Recent exhibitions include The Art of Un-belonging (solo) at London Gallery West (2018), ResponseABILITY at < rotor > center for contemporary art in Graz (2018) and Hyphen at Ambika P3, London (2019). I have presented my research internationally and my writing has been published in print and online. I have received numerous awards and residencies, including, ‘West Balkan Calling’, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (2016), the MAK-Schindler Scholarship Los Angeles (2013–14), Cité des arts Paris (2014), the CREAM research scholarship (2014–2017) and the Marianne.von.Willemer Prize for digital media (2014). My video installation ‘Surya Namaz’ has been shortlisted for the 2019 BAFTSS Practice Awards, Best Practice Research Portfolio.
Third Angel
Title: Inspiration Exchange
Abstract: “Welcome to the Inspiration Exchange. This is a simple story-swapping performance. Together we will exchange a personal catalogue of inspirations to create an eclectic, multi-contributor library of ideas, incidents and events.
Drop in to swap a story, or just to listen to other peoples’, or join us for a summing up of all the stories exchanged over the afternoon at the end of the day.”
Third Angel’s Inspiration Exchange has been presented across the UK and internationally since 2010, evolving to become a unique collection of curated stories and ideas. Where do ideas come from, it wonders? And more importantly, which ones stay with us? What are the ideas, objects, phrases, images, texts or thoughts that have inspired you in the past or continue to inspire you?
Each time the Exchange shifts in duration and format, popping up at festivals and conferences, in cafes, foyers and little side rooms in theatres, museums, galleries…anywhere there are people and ideas.
Abstract: Dr Alexander Kelly is Co-Artistic Director (with Rachael Walton) of the Sheffield-based theatre company Third Angel, with whom he devises, directs, writes, designs and performs. The company makes a range of work connecting the territories of theatre, live art, installation, film, video, photography and digital & online media, which tours throughout Britain, mainland Europe and beyond. Current and recent projects include the shows The Department of Distractions (with Northern Stage), 600 People and Inherited Cities, and the durational performances The Journeys (with SBC Theatre), The Desire Paths and Inspiration Exchange.
Alex is an experienced educator, and is Reader in Performance Practice at Leeds Beckett University. He has taught at numerous Universities across the UK, and has also taught for Third Angel at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Alex regularly mentors other artists and companies with Third Angel and through his role at Leeds Beckett.
W: http://www.thirdangel.co.uk
Cally Trench
Title: Cally Trench: Original playable board games
Abstract: My board games are both original playable games and one-off works of art that are animated and completed by people playing them. Four earlier games were played at InDialogue 2014. My games are concerned with how artists resist the over-simplification of complex social and political issues, especially emotionally-complicated issues, such as the migrant crisis, death, the environment, and marriage. I believe that board games are a way to engage with what distresses us. In general, players willingly suspend disbelief and play in earnest; board games seem to bypass the intellect and engage people directly at an emotional level. My games highlight moral and ethical problems while not suggesting solutions. Players are not invited to take up intellectual positions; instead they have to live with the choices that they make or cope with the events thrust upon them. The four games proposed for 2019 are Whirlpools and Lifebelts (2016), Gravestones and Dry Bones (2016), Trees versus Axemen (2018) and Hitched (2018). Details on my website. Players have to talk to each other. At first, the conversation can be quite formal, as they read, discuss, query and agree the rules. As the games progress, the players engage (in play at least) in competitive actions, which they may comment on, and make jokes about. People often take on the character of their role in conversation. While the players play the game, spectators often converse about the progress of the game. The games (for 2-4 players) last 5-20 minutes and have accessible rules.
Bio: Cally Trench is an artist whose work focuses on mapping, different viewpoints and ideas about privacy. Her work includes board games, time-lapse films, artist’s books, peephole boxes, and drawings. Her interest in art that invites complicity or some kind of direct physical engagement by viewers – including her board games – led to a series of four annual open submission exhibitions on the subject of play (At Play, 2009-2012), which she co-curated with Dr Outi Remes. Cally Trench has an MA (Fine Art) from Central Saint Martins. She lives and works in Buckinghamshire, and has exhibited widely. She has artist’s books in the collection of the Tate, the V&A, and the British Library.
Stephanie Vos
Title: A Decolonial Take on Dialogue: Reflections on Jazz Conversations in Stellenbosch, South Africa
Abstract: This paper presents reflections on a series of Jazz Conversations I curated between 2017 and 2019 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The series sought to tap into knowledges of jazz practitioners in South Africa, which remains mainly un(der)represented in the academy. Each event consisted of a conversation with an emerging jazz musician, followed by a performance and in some cases, a performance demonstration of their musical process. As an activism, the Jazz Conversations (as free events open to the public) were staged as interventions to create more socially diverse and inclusive social spaces in a town still yoked with apartheid history, struggling to overcome the legacies of segregation. This paper puts dialogue in the broader framework of decolonization, understood as an imperative to not only ask what knowledges are represented as knowledge, but also as an interrogation of the very terms of conversations about epistemologies. Following Walter Mignolo and drawing on the Jazz Conversations, it asks who, where, when and why knowledge is generated in music practice (rather than produced), thereby shifting the focus from the enunciated to the process of enunciation. ‘Quoting’ through soundclips from the Conversations will bring the voices of the musicians into the paper, articulating their views of an alternative ‘jazz university’ existing outside the academy among practitioners, the imperative of engaging with one’s lived environment as a creative context, and the dialogic inherent in their practices, especially in ensemble performances and improvisation. [I include a link to soundclips made of one of the Jazz Conversations with Kyle Shepherd, as an example of the perspectives this paper will engage with.]
Bio: Stephanie Vos is a postdoctoral fellow at Africa Open Institute, based at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She spearheads the Interdisciplinary Forum for Popular Music, a project that develops critical perspectives on popular music from a South African vantage point. Her research interests in South African jazz and the politics of place stem from her doctoral research at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she wrote about exile as a discourse in South African jazz, with a particular focus on the pianist Abdullah Ibrahim.
http://www.aoinstitute.ac.za/ifpop
Chris Wright
Title: Encountering
Abstract: This work uses recorded multi-dialogues that interact with the listener, with movement and with the location to present a fascinating archive of significant events in women’s lives. As the listener enters the space, there are murmurs as sounds of the voices, women’s voices, tumble out of speakers becoming louder and more individually discernible. These are women’s stories gathered from a time when an event significantly changed their life. Fragments of dialogues are heard simultaneously, weaving and interweaving the tellers’ lives through the narrative of the listeners’ own. Encountering explores ideas of different rhythms through pattern of movement of the listener and the rhythm of language. Different tongues, dialects and patterns create a textural work that relates intimately to the trajectory of the listener through the space. The stories present a varied archive of experience where the re-telling of the tale creates a different remembering. Playing simultaneously through multiple speakers, the stories become fragmented to the listener and provide a space for listeners’ own stories to become part of the work. Narratives come from England, Italy and Canada and I would be willing to record during the conference to add other experiences to the archive. The work is presented on simple plinths, each with a wireless speaker, to allow space for listeners to move around and interact with the stories both individually and collectively. I think the work would be best shown in a gallery type space as an intervention or interval. A brief clip can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/chris-a-wright-917928995/encountering-clip
Bio: Dr. Chris A. Wright is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and writer based in the UK exhibiting nationally and internationally primarily using installation, sound, film, internet idiosyncrasies and sometimes pseudo-scientific experiments. As part of my practice, I have sailed paper boats down the official borderline between Thailand and Laos on the Mekong River; blown across a bottle top in a fjord in Norway to test the liminality of sound; recorded 400,000 bees going into hives in Birmingham, used a neon pink aquarium amplified with a guitar amp to hear the inside of the bubbles and hummed in a crypt in Sardinia with an American researcher. With a practice-led PhD in Fine Art and Philosophy, my concerns are absence and presence, borders and marginal spaces, political and social engagement, materials and process with a particular current focus on sound and its relationship to time/space and where it intersects with the body.
Annie Xu
Title: A Balance Point: Reflection of Intercultural Curating
Abstract: By sharing my curatorial and interpreting experience in an exhibition in a university in Beijing (March 2019), this talk tends to reflect on the importance of knowing both sides between two different cultures/languages.
This exhibition invited over 70 artists from six different countries, with over 110 artworks. As one of the two executive curators (the other is Professor Steve Dutton), I need to communicate between the artists, curators, head of the team (in China), workers, volunteer students, and securities all the time. The procedure of curating in China is very different from the UK. Although all of the team members contribute a lot for the exhibition, in order to make the exhibition take place in time and successful, however, seeking a “balance point” between “Chinese approach” and “Western approach” is very important. An unintentional expression from one side, could cause misunderstanding and offend the other side.
The same situation happened when I played interpreter’s role during that time. Most of the Chinese scholars, artists and students can read and write English, but not good at listening and speaking. I have to interpret for the lecture, seminar, opening ceremony, and daily issues. Culture shock happened to every international artist/scholar, but still, the point is to find a balance in between. Sometimes, the problem is not about who’s wrong or who’s right. It’s just about the difference.
Although there were a lot of issues, problems, arguments during the preparation works, the exhibition opened successfully and gained a lot of compliments. To me, the point of a “dialogue” is to have a result, is to reach an “agreement” between two or more parties. The more different the parties are, the more difficult to reach the “agreement”. Therefore, it is very important to have a “bridge” person between the parties, the one that knows all parties. Just as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: When you know your side and the other’s side well, you will never fail (“知己知彼百战不殆”).
Bio:Dr (Annie) Rujia Xu is a text artist, curator and researcher who has a PhD degree in Art from the University of Lincoln in Contemporary Art and Curating. Her art practice and philosophical reflection are transdisciplinary which involves art, philosophy, literature, linguistics, philology, translation, Chinese studies, history, culture and politics in both Western and Chinese contexts. Xu suggests innovative interpretation regarding the contemporaneity and textuality of Contemporary Text Art and the historical-cultural communication between China and the West. She also contributes pioneering practice in VR text art. She attempts to interpret Western art categories with Chinese classical philosophy and explores transdisciplinary art practice. Xu independently and collaboratively curated a number of international contemporary art exhibitions, whilst being involved in several research projects.
InDialogue 