My review of Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method is now live at Leonardo Reviews. The review will be included in print in Leonardo 58.2 (due for publication in February 2025).
Sonic Faction was a pair of events, one held at Iklectik in London (July 2022) and one at KARST in Plymouth (February 2023), where three works were presented for collective listening, along with a public discussion and an installation of related material. The three pieces were: Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land (2006), Steve Goodman’s Astro-Darien (2021) and Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2022). This book takes on several tasks, operating as a catalogue for or record of the events, offering an expanded commentary on the works presented and giving significant detail on the conception, making and presentation of these. The book also functions as a primer or a means toward defining or describing a genre – the audio essay – situating it in historic, artistic, critical, theoretical contexts. In pursuit of this, the book brings together a selection of essays that describe or demonstrate the audio essay as a medium and as an approach to making art. Bringing together writing by artists, theorists, publishers, broadcasters the mix of perspectives and modes of involvement with the audio essay results in an array of textual riches, supplemented by a comprehensive playlist on YouTube.
Social Making 2024ended yesterday afternoon at Bricks, St Anne’s House in Bristol. Now that I am back at my desk, I have a moment to reflect and gather my impressions or sense of the two days. As I mentioned at the close of the event, this was Social Making’s first foray out of Plymouth. The intention was to get closer to other communities and practitioners and makers, to situate the symposium in another city with a different context and history. Bristol has a long history of activism, of alternative thinking, of trying to do things in a different way that works better for people. Future iterations of Social Making will happen in other places, so that the event remains mobile, responsive, engaged. This is about extending and continuing and developing conversations and interactions, about building networks and validating and affirming the work being done in other communities, by other organisations. Take A Part want to share good ways of doing things, and to support others in this. I hope the ideas and exchanges that were shared and happened over the two days at Bricks, will carry on in various ways over the coming weeks or months.
In the presentations and workshops at Social Making, from the first morning to the afternoon of Friday, questions of economics, of access and of agency were raised, care and risk were reconsidered. Anarupa Roy told how the mask or the puppet head allowed for a different experience of risk, of participation, where the distance or gap the papier mâché persona offered allowed performers to enter spaces and engage in activity that might be dangerous or threatening for an individual. In a parallel way, acting as part of a collective, being a member of a group, such as in protests organised by the Right to Roam movement, or in the 1932 Kinder Scout Trespass, as Nadia Shaikh discussed, gives an individual agency alongside a sense of belonging. This can support action that would feel too dangerous or culturally uncomfortable for some people. In her talk on Company Drinks, Kathrin Böhm described different economic models, and reminded us that we all carry financial knowledge, that the management of a household budget, or decisions on how to spend pocket money require economic skill. In different ways each of these presenters reminded me how institutions and structures and systems operate to divide, to separate, and through this to limit and control behaviour and activity. How they reduce and restrict our lives and living.
In the workshops we were sometimes shown or encouraged to test other ways of acting and being. Citizens in Power got groups of us to wrestle with the complexities of establishing a Citizens Assembly, practically demonstrating how conflictual debating models of decision-making exclude voices and restrict participation. In Megan Clark-Bagnall’s Blue-Sky Thinking workshop, we dissolved concerns and played with shades of blue to imagine better futures, arriving at clouds of sweet possibility as we shared our hopes for humans and the planet. Dais Hale’s workshop on tools for intersectional working got me reflecting on my everyday practice as a teacher, resolving to bring some new caring and careful elements into the teaching space. Each of the delegates and presenters and team at Social Making will have had a different experience as we met different people through the days, did different activities together, ate our food at different tables. I hope that for each person there was some moment of spark, of realisation that I can take this away with me, I can use this, or I can connect with this person again.
Looking across the programme, and considering the intentions of Social Making 2024, I sense the wish to offer alternatives, to prompt other ways to do things. If establishment models of discourse function to set up conflict, or depend on oppositional debating modes, can we adopt deliberate discussion in the spaces we work in, and for the tasks we are addressing? Capitalist models of ownership focus on extraction, on consumption, on framing individuals as consumers, separated in their individual satisfactions. Mainstream media and social media platforms denigrate collective, common, regenerative approaches to decision-making, to creation, to living. Can the suggestions and encounters at Social Making nudge us toward responses that resist these pressures to isolate, atomise and separate? These pressures stop us being people that can live and work together; this is something we need to find ways to do. My hope is that we continue the conversations begun in Bristol, that we seek out these other models, ways of being in common, of distributing agency, to keep some of the energy generated in these two days as we return to our ongoing work.
Mark Leahy, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Take A Part CIO
I will give an artist talk for The Fine Art Department at University of Plymouth today, 6th March 2024. Titled, ‘Performance Process and Materials: Making Work Happen’ the presentation is aimed mainly at undergraduate Fine Art students.
“Using examples from my practice over recent years, I will look at how you might consider relationships between studio practice and making live art or performance, and how you might present live work. Projects develop differently, they originate from different beginnings or get nudged by circumstances. Work gets shared in different forms, to different audiences or contexts. Starting with process and materials, ideas we are familiar with from painting or drawing or moving image, I will discuss my engagement with text, actions, voice and body. Alongside this, I will talk about various platforms or ways of sharing and showing performance-related work.”
Some images from my performance of ‘cream of the crop’ at SOAK Live Art in Leadworks, Plymouth on January 25th. The night was very successful, with a large attentive and supportive audience. Thanks to Tamas Kovacs for the photos, and to Kerry Priest and Nuria Bonet Filella for coordinating the evening.
Three Games for Grass: Hay Bale Circuiting, Grass Bucket Head Crawl and Bale Bouldering
Short videos screening as part of Alive & Kicking, Live Art Ireland, Saturday 9th December
While on the ‘grass’ residency in October 2023, I worked in the fields near Milford House, responding to the place, to the evidence of farming, to processes and materials used in the growth, harvesting, and storage of grass. Playing with buckets, fertilizer bags, hay and silage bales, I considered the grass as a crop, as fodder and as having economic value in the production of milk or beef. Close to the ground, walking through the fields each day, I was aware of plants as indicators of environmental damage, of ecological disruption, as impacted by human activity. The playing began to take shape as a set of new games or sports, drawing on the tradition of local sports in rural Ireland, from parish-level GAA to the Community Games to school sports days. There is also a sense of gamification expanding into all areas of life, the continued prioritising of growth models along with notions of progress, despite compelling evidence of climate crisis and environmental breakdown. The performer-player embodies an intersection of sport and agriculture, weaving his way among the abandoned hay bales, manoeuvring a bucket across a field, wrestling with plastic-wrapped silage bales. What is winning in these systems? How are conditions on the ground? Where is the benefit when the scores are totted up?
