Memory

Performance Research Vol 6. No. 1. Spring 2001

Departures

The first of three related issues which engage with the migrations of people, performance and performance cultures, generating writing around differing geographies and histories of travel and travelling performance in a diversity of written and visual forms.

Leaving Berlin : On the Performance of Monumental Change

Nicolas Whybrow

pp. 37 – 45

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert-the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves-Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

This fully-illustrated book brings together for the first time an account of Baker’s career as an artist – from her first sculptures at Central St Martins in the early 1970s to her most recent work, ‘How to Live’ and ‘Diary Drawings’ – with critical commentary by reviewers and academic practitioners.

This title offers the gender-bending performances of Dlane Torr, creator of the Man for a Day workshops. This book documents and contextualizes the development of Torr’s internationally celebrated workshops, as well as her own ongoing experiments in performing gender-play in theaters, galleries, and clubs.

Interviews with people at the intersection of disability, queerness, kink, sex work and survivorship.

Common Salt was a performance around a table – a ‘show and tell’ by artists Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. It explored the colonial, geographical and natural history of England and India taking an expansive and emotional time-travel, from the first Enclosure Act and the start of the East India Company in the 1600s, to 21st century narratives of trade, empire and culture.

In the performance Sue and Sheila activated insights into our shared past, laying out a ‘home museum’ of objects and stories about borders and collections, the Great Hedge of India, a forgotten naturalist – all accompanied by original Shruti box laments.

This book documents and explores the project, placing the performance text, images and reflections from both artists alongside writings by invited guests – from curators and artists to audience members.

Common Salt is designed by John Hunter (aka RULER) and published by LADA.

This book is Derek Jarman’s own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken since 1991 by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season of the year. Photographs from all angles reveal the garden’s complex geometrical plan, its magical stone circles and its beautiful and bizarre sculptures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman’s life in Dungeness: walking, weeding, watering, or just enjoying life.

Featuring conversations, essays, drawings and photographs, Bodies of Knowledge(Ed. Laura Purseglove) reflects and builds on an interdisciplinary project involving artists, amateur and professional dancers, wrestlers, members of a trans community group and academic researchers interrogating how our bodies are both produced by and productive of knowledges.

Book in English with translations to Serbian and French language
With essays by Dr Marina Grzinic, Dr Suzana Milevska and Tanja Ostojić

‘The book, that started four years ago as a possible form in which my ephemeral works could live on, gradually developed into an intensive writing project about movement and the imaginative power of language.’ Toine Horvers

This series of interviews, held by curator and writer Gilane Tawadros are focussed entirely on Stuart Brisley’s practice and directed by him. The artist’s narration of his practice demonstrates an unswerving resistance to controlling the narrative or fixing the meaning of his works.

This book was produced as part of ‘Challenging Archives’, at. the University of Bristol Theatre Collection: a Wellcome funded project to catalogue and conserve the archive of the artist Franco B. Maddy Costa and Mary Paterson were writers in residence for the project from 2018-2020.