Session 2: Liquid Gold

Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, hosted by Lucy A. Sames

25 November 2020, 3-5pm

For this session Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie will present a performance reading that draws on thematics from their recent collaborative works Deeper in the Pyramid (2018) and The Inextinguishable (2020).

Jackson and Leslie’s collaborative publication The Inextinguishable for the 39th EVA International (Co. Limerick, Ireland) is an ongoing exploration of dairy long associated with the “Golden Vein”, a 19th century descriptor for the agricultural bounty of the Limerick region. Milk is a primal fluid, identified with care – yet its sensational qualities are captured by science in bio-political skeins of big data analysis in Ireland and internationally to make it one of the most technologized fluids on the planet.

The Inextinguishable might be a sign of hope – the will to live, the light that never goes out, the fire that burns on. Brigit, the female Patron Saint of Ireland, whose pantry never emptied, so she might hand out the everlasting milk and butter, also kept a fire alight for 500 years in Kildare. It produced no ashes and it could not be approached by men. What powers lie within elements turned mythical – in fire, and in the products of dairy. The Inextinguishable explores the inexhaustible resonances of milk and butter, seen through the prism of Irish history and the calamities of the present.

Readings

A pdf of Deeper in the Pyramid can be downloaded here and free hard copies of The Inextinguishable will be mailed to participants ahead of the session upon request.

The Liquidity Cohort is a growing group of researchers who work with various notions of liquidity from the body (in the broadest sense, human and otherwise) to material infrastructures. We are interested in “liquidity” as an immersive experience of being-in-the-world and its implications for practice; questions of how to write from states of immersion, how to work from the body immersed in experience. We are also interested in hydrological and technological infrastructures and their impacts on the body and its worlds. The Liquidity Cohort was initiated by Dr. Bridget Crone (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths) in 2018, and is open to researchers from CHASE institutions. Please get in touch if you’d like to join us. Supported by CHASE Consortium Development Grant.

Melanie Jackson is a UK based artist working with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image. Recent exhibitions include Deeper in the Pyramid, Banner Repeater, London, Grand Union, Birmingham, and Primary, Nottingham (2018). The latter is a multi-faceted project of sculpture, moving image, performance lectures, and a publication, involving an ongoing writing collaboration with writer Esther Leslie. Previous solo exhibitions include The Urpflanze (Parts 1 and 2) with Flat Time House, The Drawing Room, Art Exchange and John Hansard Gallery, and with Matt’s Gallery, Arnolfini and Chapter. Jackson is represented by Matt’s Gallery and is currently a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include Deeper in the Pyramid (with Melanie Jackson, Banner Repeater, 2018); Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (Reaktion, 2016); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005); and Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2002).

Lucy A. Sames is a Curator and Researcher living and working in the Welsh Valleys and London. She is a final year curatorial practice-based PhD candidate in the Art Department at Northumbria University, Newcastle. She is curator and convener of Wet Rest; a member of the Liquidity Cohort at Goldsmiths, University of London; and a member of the Social Morphology Research Unit in the Anthropology Department and Slade School of Art at University College London (UCL).

Liquidity Cohort | Session 3: Bodies that Weather: Hurricane Katrina and ‘Viscous Porosity’

Bodies that Weather: Hurricane Katrina and ‘Viscous Porosity’

A reading group led by Kate Pickering

2 December 2020, 3-5pm

Christina Sharpe writes in ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’ (2016) of the climate of anti-blackness that black bodies continue to weather. This occluded reality is foregrounded when a catastrophe such as hurricane Katrina intensifies this weathering and draws the gaze of the world onto the deep inequalities caused by federal complacency and structural oppressions. This year a record number of hurricanes have made landfall in the US. Within the state of Louisiana the Gulf Coast is disappearing into the sea at the rate of a football field an hour. Whilst New Orleans has largely recovered from Katrina, communities along the Gulf Coast continue to face ongoing climate crisis. Nancy Tuana proposes the term ‘Viscous Porosity’ in order to think through the way discrete categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘social’ and ‘biological’ are interrelated and made viscous within an event such as Katrina. In this session we will consider Tuana’s term, read Rebecca Solnit’s writing in relation to the centrality of belief in individual and community response to such a disaster, and lastly deploy Dionne Brand’s poem ‘Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora’ along with the concept of ‘Beloved Community’ to think through the possibilities of orientation and openness within the onslaught of climate crisis.

Readings

Tuana, N. (2008) ‘Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina’ in Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. J. (eds) (2008) Material feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p. 188-210 [Please note you can read highlighted sections instead of whole text for brevity!]

Solnit, R. (2010) A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin Books. p. 231-246 [Highlighted sections for brevity]

The Liquidity Cohort is a growing group of researchers who work with various notions of liquidity from the body (in the broadest sense, human and otherwise) to material infrastructures. We are interested in “liquidity” as an immersive experience of being-in-the-world and its implications for practice; questions of how to write from states of immersion, how to work from the body immersed in experience. We are also interested in hydrological and technological infrastructures and their impacts on the body and its worlds. The Liquidity Cohort was initiated by Dr. Bridget Crone (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths) in 2018, and is open to researchers from CHASE institutions. Please get in touch if you’d like to join us. Supported by CHASE Consortium Development Grant.

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. This performed writing creates experiences of bodily orientation and disorientation for an audience as a way to think through how language is world building. The focus of her research is the Evangelical megachurch, specifically how the narrative of Evangelicalism is mediated through site, performance, spectacle and scale to orient the believer in the world, and how a performative poetics might reorient the believer toward a fluid imaginary. Her writing has featured in various publications, including soanyway magazine, Misery Connoisseur, EROS journal, Yellow Pages (Copy Press) and K[]NESH, 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.

https://kate-pickering.com/

https://www.instagram.com/writing_a_body_of_belief/

Image credit: Kate Pickering

Liquidity Cohort | Session 4: Liquifying Selves: Toxicity, Tales and Transindividuation

Liquifying Selves: Toxicity, Tales and Transindividuation

A reading group led by James Hendrix Elsey

9th December 2020, 3-5pm

The governance associated with Covid-19 has sought to establish the ontological boundaries of selfhood at the scale of the ‘bubble’. This aquatic phraseology is more than just a coincidence – those within one of these are, in theory, part of a discrete unit of droplet-circulation. As the pandemic forces us to adopt new hydro-hermetic praxes, we will examine some other ways in which liquid has already presented counter-ontologies to those of the Cartesian self.

These will include the poetic: exploring the prototypical text, the Epic of Gilgamesh, as both a flood-myth and a transformative moment in the historical development of the protagonist-as-self; the biochemical, when many centuries later, the region was invaded by US forces under pretenses of democracy, a system of governance through liquid association, during which bullet cases left behind a toxic leaden aftermath, eventually winding up in bloodstreams, brains, and breast milk; and the philosophical, examining modes of co-individuated, collective and intersubjective being and becoming.

We will read through these ideas at sites of confluence, between the rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, where toxicity, myth, and the viral memetics of the written word enter into general circulation.

Readings (available upon registering for the session)

TBC

The Liquidity Cohort is a growing group of researchers who work with various notions of liquidity from the body (in the broadest sense, human and otherwise) to material infrastructures. We are interested in “liquidity” as an immersive experience of being-in-the-world and its implications for practice; questions of how to write from states of immersion, how to work from the body immersed in experience. We are also interested in hydrological and technological infrastructures and their impacts on the body and its worlds. The Liquidity Cohort was initiated by Dr. Bridget Crone (Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths) in 2018, and is open to researchers from CHASE institutions. Please get in touch if you’d like to join us. Supported by CHASE Consortium Development Grant.

James Hendrix Elsey is a researcher, artist, and certificate student in Critical Philosophy at the New Centre for Research and Practice, currently living between Lisbon and London. Research interests centre around conceptions of time, millenarian theory and speculative fiction. And a recent alumnus of the Contemporary Art Theory MA in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

His recent projects include ‘Doomsday Anonymous’ a reading/support group throughout lockdown, in which networked mutual support and discussion of various themes relating to a foreclosure of the future, and forming strategies for conviviality; co-authoring/editing ‘Subtexts’, a collection of literature relating to intense, weird experiences of the subterranean; co-organising ‘Slipstream’, a series of multimedia artist broadcasts on Twitch.tv to fundraise for refugee charities.

https://www.instagram.com/jameshendrixelsey/

Image:

Blood-brain barrier of a mouse: The brain’s blood vessels are lined with endothelial cells that are wedged tightly together, creating a nearly impermeable boundary between the brain and bloodstream. This image shows a section through a blood vessel (black) in the brain of a mouse as well as endothelial cells (surrounded by glial cells in green) and processed from surrounding brain cells (in red). Credit: C.J. Guerin, MRC Toxicology Unit / Science Source.