Talk + Screening: Sylvere Lotringer on Artaud

In The Man Who Disappeared, Sylvère Lotringer, cultural theorist and founder of Semiotext(e), gives a personal artistic response to Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937.. Shot on location on the island of Inishmore with the help of Irish collaborators, the film imagines the ten days Artaud spent on the windswept Aran Islands prior to his descent into madness and deportation to France in a straitjacket.

The film’s premiere coincides with the much anticipated recent translation of the book Mad Like Artaud – Lotringer’s creative response to Artaud’s treatment at the hands of the French psychiatrists in Rodez, a section of which will be performed live at a second partner event at the Showroom Gallery on 28 May.
There will be a discussion following the screening moderated by curator Katherine Waugh (Irish co-producer of the film) with Lotringer as special guest, artist and performer Jeremy Hardingham who plays Artaud, and writer Stephen Barber, Artaud scholar and Professor at Kingston University.

Thu 26 May 7.00pm | in English | Free but booking essential: 020 7871 3515 / box.office@institutfrancais.org.uk

http://www.institut-francais.org.uk/events-calendar/whats-on/theatre/sylvere-lotringer-on-artaud/

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Bringing Ancient Sounds Back to Life, by Alex Marshall

LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”

With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.

Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.

He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.

 The classical record label Delphian is also releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.

John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iiron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”

“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”

The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic era to around A.D. 1,000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).

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Horror and the Art of Noise, by Philip Hausmann

Fifty years ago, on September 20, 1963, director Alfred Hitchcock shocked movie-goers with his thriller that showcased killer birds. Perhaps even more than the images of assaults by seagull and crows, it was the birds' chilling screeches that worked themselves into cinema fans' collective consciousness.
It's a jarring story with a number of surprising elements: after a brief encounter in a pet shop, Melanie Daniels follows attorney Mitch Brenner to the California coast, where Brenner wants to spend the weekend in Bodega Bay. There, Daniels is attacked and injured by a seagull. More attacks occur, and increase in intensity, until some people are killed. Huge swarms of birds begin terrorizing the town. Many residents flee; others barricade themselves in their homes.

In his film, Hitchcock manages to transform seemingly harmless and familiar creatures into deadly beasts. But for the soundtrack, his audio crew was originally only able to come up with the quaint tweets of backyard birds. "I hear sounds like that all day long. I need something that is really coming to shake people up!" the film king told them. Hitchcock saw the soundtrack as integral to his 1963 movie.

 The trautonium

When Hitchcock met Remi Gassmann, a former student of German composer Paul Hindemith, for the first time, Gassmann said he knew the right person for the job: his former fellow student from Berlin, music pioneer Oskar Sala. Hitchcock didn't hesitate for long.

And Sala placed his bets on an unusual instrument: the trautonium. Named after its inventor, Friedrich Trautwein, this electronic instrument resembling a little organ is considered a predecessor to the analog synthesizer.

Hitchcock had heard sounds from the instrument once before: on Berlin Radio at the end of the 1920s. But for the film, Oskar Sala used the instrument to create all sorts of noises: the cries of the birds, the slamming of windows and doors, even the hammering by the people wanting to barricade their homes to protect themselves from the flying fiends. All of the sounds were created in Sala's little studio in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg in 1961.

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Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin III

Friday 12th Feb 

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, vocal contaminations, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan on Holloway Road London.

Full address will be released soon, check here for updates:
https://www.facebook.com/events/160736174297009/

Acts:

Jose Macabra
http://soundcloud.com/josemacabra

Martin Palmer and Angela Edwards
http://xenogenetic.net/
http://www.angelacarolinedwardsart.com/

Douglas Park
http://douglasism.blogspot.co.uk/

CAO
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6
http://www.cao-music.net/

Richard Crow & Carmelo Bene
http://soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm

KALLA
https://www.facebook.com/kallanoise/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Neo Fung
http://neofung.tumblr.com/

House of Health
https://www.facebook.com/houseofhealthcollective/?pnref=lhc

Astaroth
https://soundcloud.com/astaroth29
https://vimeo.com/129025026

The Flesh Gallery (video installation)
https://vimeo.com/150777402

The Company You Keep, by Shruti Ravindran

Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self.

Rosie’s marriage did not last long. But many months after she returned to her parents’ cottage on a south Indian tea estate, her husband’s voice rattled around her head like a vengeful earworm, berating her for her dark skin and overall worthlessness. One day, another voice spoke up. It was gravelly and hoarse, like a grandma who had chain-smoked cheroots for half a century. ‘There is a goddess within you,’ it rasped. ‘She can make you fairer and prettier. Listen to her instructions.’ That is how Rosie arrived at the beauty regimen she followed every day for the next 10 years: collecting excrement at dawn, and carefully smoothing it across her limbs and face.

The regimen caused her father, a widower, to eject her from his home. Rosie eventually found herself in a shelter on the outskirts of the city Chennai. Here, a kind young man informed her that she suffered from schizophrenia, and that the old lady didn’t exist. Rosie listened to what he said, but she was not sure she believed him. After all, the old lady said only what Rosie had been hearing all her life, from her mother, her friends, her husband, and her television set. They all spoke in one voice, telling her that dark skin was unlovable, that fairness was synonymous with femininity, and that she should whiten her skin at any cost.

 I first heard about Rosie from the social worker Vandana Gopikumar, co-founder of the Banyan, the shelter in Chennai where Rosie lives. She said hers was one of the most extreme cases she’d seen. ‘But what struck me then,’ she said, ‘was how much the voice reflected her socio-cultural background.’ Like many epiphanies, Gopikumar’s sounds startlingly obvious. It seems natural that imagined voices reflect the fears, anxieties and desires of their hearers, and for these emotions to be shaped, in turn, by the pressures and expectations of local culture.

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Exhibition: The Book of Evil Spirits, Chiara Fumai

28 January - 23 April 2016
Private view Wednesday, 27 January, 6-9pm

waterside contemporary

2 Clunbury Str, N1 6TT London, United Kingdom

waterside contemporary is pleased to present The Book of Evil Spirits, an expanded video installation by Chiara Fumai, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The Book brings together a number of characters whose narratives Fumai has embodied in her performative practice to date. In creating this catalogue, Fumai enlisted the help of Eusapia Palladino, a 19th century internationally renowned psychic and medium whose séances were attended with conviction by the likes of Nicholas II of Russia, and Nobel-laureates Marie and Pierre Curie.

Participation in the séance requires a departure from the rational and the conscious; by calling on a medium - and becoming one herself – the artist bypasses cultural structures, and her own narrative method itself. Fumai has borrowed from an array of historical characters, often women in history who from marginal positions gained recognition for voicing their dissent. They have included the writer and activist Ulrike Meinhof, bearded lady Annie Jones, philosopher Carla Lonzi, and indeed Palladino, the artist’s muse. Fumai allows herself to become ‘possessed’ by them, and under the comfortable guise of re-enactment, hijacks their narratives for her own purpose.

In The Book, Palladino convenes the spirits of Fumai’s motley crew of evil spirits – activists, terrorists, freak-show performers, philosophers, all at one point alter-egos of Fumai herself – who collectively represent the fears of a bourgeois society. The artist’s camp parody is itself obscured by knowing anachronism and occasional bursts of uncontrollable stage violence.

The events are observed and narrated by the French scientist Camille Flammarion, Palladino’s contemporary and a scholar of mediumship, who takes turns with himself in affirming and discrediting what he sees. This place of misunderstanding and fragmentation is at the crux of Fumai’s production: presented with the sitting are various paraphernalia relating to the ghosts and the medium herself – a spirit board, collages of automatic writing, an anonymous message of warning spelt out in International Sign alphabet. ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Arrivederci.

Chiara Fumai (1978, Italy), lives and ‘unworks’ in Milan. Recent one-woman-shows include Der Hexenhammer at Museion, Bolzano, 2015; With Love from $inister at A Palazzo, Brescia; I Did Not Say or Mean 'Warning' at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2013.

Her recent group exhibitions and performances have been presented at David Roberts Art Foundation, Contour Mechelen, CA2M Madrid, 2015; Whitechapel Galley, De Appel Amsterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, Fiorucci Art Trust, London, 2014; MUSAC, 2013; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012; Nomas Foundation, 2011.

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The other KKK: how the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift tried to craft a new world, by Jon Savage

George Orwell thought they were ‘sex maniacs’. They thought they were spiritual samurai, rebuilding Britain after the Great War. With their magical rituals, outdoor living and utopian vision, they are the most fascinating of forgotten youth movements – and their ideas still resonate.

Young men and women strike ritualistic poses on Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington and the Long Man of Wilmington: stark figures wearing strange, hieratic clothes in the elemental landscape. Taken in 1929, there is something disquieting about these black and white photographs. You feel as though you have intruded on the rites of a secret society that may or may not be benign, that indeed intends to be ambiguous and unsettling.

In one image, a young woman in long belted coat and cap is captured raising her arm by a standing stone. It’s an echo of the salute that would sweep Germany only a few years later, and it jars the viewer back into a time between the wars: a continent destroyed, and a desperate search for new solutions that often took curious forms.

Annebella Pollen’s The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift is a revelation. This scholarly book explores England’s most fascinating and forgotten youth movement. Through a detailed examination of the highways and byways of esoteric thought and alternative politics in the early 20th century, as well as plentiful photographs (many taken by a young Angus McBean, an active kinsman in the late 1920s), it reconstructs a radical moment lost to history, a future that never happened.
Formed by John Hargrave in 1920, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were an extraordinary mixture of the archaic and the hypermodern. A back-to-the-land movement that used the techniques of contemporary advertising, it offered a holistic, dazzling vision. As Hargrave wrote in 1924: “The method of the Kibbo Kift is based upon a direct appeal to the senses by means of colour, shape, sound and movement, that is, by every form of symbolism.”

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Exhibititon: Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred

10 October 2015 – 13 March 2016

This archive display features rare woodcarvings, furniture, ceremonial dress designs and photographs of the English organisation The Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920-1932).

Formed by the artist, writer and pacifist John Hargrave after becoming disillusioned with the Boy Scout movement, the Kibbo Kift philosophy was based on a shared appreciation of nature and handicraft, as well as a commitment to world peace. Though small in number, notable members of the group included suffragettes, scientists and the novelist H.G.Wells. A 1929 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery was a way of spreading their ideas, and this display reveals their remarkable aesthetic drawn from ancient Egyptian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Native American crafts, dress and language.

Through revealing photographs and footage of the group on parades and camping trips, this display presents not only a forgotten moment in British social movements but a futuristic vision which continues to resonate today.

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

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