Bald Cypress trees in the Pearl River, Louisiana. (2019) credit: Kate Pickering
Tuesday 4th August, 5pm GMT, Live.
Ayesha Hameed, Kate Pickering, Lucy A. Sames and Bridget Crone
In this session, a group of artists, writers and curators will read from their work building and exploring speculative, liquid worlds.
The series of readings will be followed by a short conversation addressing different approaches to the notion of liquidity as a methodology or process of sensory and the extra-sensory, and as a speculative space of world-building and undoing.
Bridget Crone, Swampy Ecologies: Excerpts
LIQUID WORLDS will be introduced by Bridget Crone through a reading of excerpts from her ongoing work on liquid bodies and liquid worlds. Taking the form of a series of short aphorisms in this instance, the text sketches a liquid terrain as both a biophysical, fictional and ethical space of knotted interconnections, conjunctions and flows, what she has termed a “swampy ecology”.
Bridget Crone is a curator and writer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, The University of London. Her work weaves together forms of speculation and enquiry across fields of practice to propose new forms of encounter between body, time and the image. Her edited book, The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image was published in a second revised and extended edition by Intellect / University of Chicago Press, 2017. Recent work includes, the essay, “Swampy Ecologies”, which explores the film work, Swamp (1969) by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson (published by the Holt Smithson Foundation, 2020.
Ayesha Hameed, Songs for Petals
Ayesha Hameed’s newly published cycle of poems Songs for Petals (L’Internationale Online 2020) reflects on the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India and its prehistories. Reading from the text, she’ll be thinking through the relation between the oceanic, violence, history and protest, and the continuities/discontinuities between her previous project Black Atlantis and this new work.
Ayesha Hameed lives in London, UK. Since 2014 Hameed’s multi-chapter project ‘Black Atlantis’ has looked at the Black Atlantic and its afterlives in contemporary illegalized migration at sea, in oceanic environments, through Afrofuturistic dancefloors and soundsystems and in outer space. Through videos, audio essays and performance lectures, she examines how to think through sound, image, water, violence and history as elements of an active archive; and time travel as an historical method. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2020), Gothenburg Biennale (2019), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of ‘Futures and Fictions’ (Repeater 2017) and co-author of ‘Visual Cultures as… Time Travel’ (Sternberg forthcoming 2020). She is currently Co-Programme Leader of the PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.
Lucy A. Sames, Wet Rest
Curator and writer, Lucy A. Sames will discuss states of psychophysical immersion, porosity and excess as modalities of speculative worldbuilding. The conversation will centre on her ongoing research project Wet Rest that utilises sensory attenuation as both metaphor and embodied methodology for artistic research.
Lucy A. Sames is a curator and writer based in the Welsh Valleys. She is an Associate Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London and a PhD candidate in the Art department at Northumbria University, Newcastle. She is curator and convener of Wet Rest; a member of the Social Morphologies Research Unit at University College London (UCL); and Co-Director and Co-Curator at Res.
Kate Pickering, There is a Miracle in Your Mouth
Kate Pickering will read an extract from writing in progress, which begins in the ground underneath Lakewood, North America’s largest megachurch. The text explores the world-making of American Evangelicalism, and remakes this world through a fiction in which the building develops consciousness. The building-body’s thoughts and dreams are interwoven with an account of an approaching hurricane and a retelling of the history of Lakewood through its’ relationship to the subterranean ground, swampy bayou and atmospheric humidity of Bible belt Texas.
Kate Pickering is a London based artist, writer and PhD researcher (AHRC scholarship) in the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Pickering writes experimental prose poetry which she develops into site based performative readings. Her writing has featured in various publications, including soanyway magazine, Misery Connoisseur, EROS journal, Yellow Pages (Copy Press) and K[]NESH Space, and has been performed at Tenderpixel, ASC Gallery, X Marks Le Bokship, Library Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada) and the ICA. Pickering co-runs the Writing for Practice Forum for artists who write, and participates in Wet Rest, run by Lucy A. Sames and the Liquidity Cohort, a research group run by Bridget Crone.
Liquidity Cohort
Bridget, Kate and Lucy are members of the Liquidity Cohort – a group of researchers focussed on speculative approaches to thinking, practicing and writing from a states of immersion towards future possibilities and the project of survival in the broadest possible sense. Initiated in 2019, by Dr Bridget Crone we address the philosophical and speculative alongside materially situated research and activist projects. We meet irregularly at Goldsmiths, University of London, and have received support from CHASE Cohort Development Fund.