March

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.

Between Journeys : an Interview with Lee Wen

Woon Tien Wei

pp. 3 – 7

shado Issue 2 : Global Womxnhood

Feature on poet and performer Tolu Agbelusi.

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.

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.

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

In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer–Rosa Parks–to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change.

“(…) What could be good practice, in a moment like this? What is the art organisation needed for a no-future public? and what would a sustainable, feminist organisation look like?…”

The text was previously published in Who’s Art For? Art Workers Against Exploitation, edited by R-set/tools for cultural workers (Impasse) in collaboration with Rete al Femminile, postmedia books, 2019.

Edition 60/70

This story is a product of lockdown, of not being able to create gatherings and experiences with, and for, other people. It is an account of intensely personal histories and experiences, that usually stay behind the screens. It is also a document of the Heteraclub project and the safe space created there, in which hundreds of women shared their stories of love and pleasure.

The Swiss art-rock band Les Reines Prochaines emerged from the youth and feminist movement of the 1980s. The movie traces the distinctive history of the Reines Prochaines and captures the artists in rehearsal and during their day to day life on tour.

Kindly donated for the Swiss live Art Study Room Guide.

Languages Swiss German, German.

77 minutes, HD

Bodies move freely through an ambiguous urban “utopia”…or do they? Shot on 16mm film and digital video.

7 mins

A popular lesbian ‘commercial,’ 110 images of sensual touching montages in A, B, C, D rolls of ‘kinaesthetic’ editing.

4 mins.