Coastal Collaboration+ Terminalia gig link Leeds
Here I am again with a new post, it’s taken ages! Months!
And that’s for an artful reason. So my last post was on Revolution and Time, and since that time there’s been a revolution! And that has been my collaboration with new
artpartner Simon Bradley. We met at the World Congress of Psychogeography 2017, and we found that we had a lot of concerns, practices, and artwork areas in common. He did a doctorate on The Archeology of the Voice, and that resonated with my work on the politics of speaking, such as in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ (Spivack). He concentrates on Displacement Activities, and that resonates with my work on the politics of belonging, such as in my ‘My-grations’ project, and also in ‘Each Other’s Islands’. We have also both been performers. So it made sense for us to collaborate, though I hesitated. I had other work too. In the end we arrived at the point of art together again, and collaboration became kind of inevitable. The context was there and the theories, Deleuze, Deep Maps, Spaghetti Junction, Drigg, Wasdale. Then the conferences at which we presented: Cardiff, Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, and then Split, Croatia. And the gigs: in Huddersfield and at the Cave in Pimlico.
At that time I lived in London and he lived in Leeds, but eventually we both left the city, in parts, behind. To experience something new, a different everyday-life, seemed a great challenge and a novel territory, and to find space for art, and more time too. Our first destination together was our mid-point between London and Leeds, which is Leicester – and from there we moved on, further north, to coastal Cumbria.
So it’s not the Lake District bit where we went, the famous bit, it’s the bit by the side, where the coast is, the impoverished periphery. We are here on the edge of the Irish Sea, on the way to Scotland, and at the southern end of the Solway Firth. So it’s a junction here, where lots of lines meet, lots of areas intersect. Here is Maryport, harbour town, mining town, coastal post-industrial, dodgy post-empire. Port town, post-town, always a post-modern apocalypse on the side, but this is where it’s at. Our common context in a nutshell, sea-shell.
A psychogeo-sea
Our work has been around psychogeography, and now we are at the sea. So it’s a psychogeo-sea. Place-specific. We are doing deep mapping, flow-charting, and interventions. It’s all happening. Words are emerging and images, have a look at these to start with.
Our next performance, cum intervention, will be at Leeds Terminalia – Festival of Psychogeography – on the 23rd February, with ‘Out of it’. Pop in and find out, there’s always a lot of interesting stuff going on at Terminalia, named so after the Roman god Terminus, the God of Thresholds: terminaliafestival.org
Our blog artcouple.co.uk is coming soon! Have a wee look! And there’s also good stuff on Simon’s blog at DisplacementActivities.org
ColourCirclesite 