DEATH IN THE METROPOLIS
Featuring new media installation from Kathy Hinde and Ann Rosen contemporary performance from Katharine Fry, Beatrice Jarvis, Stavroula Kounadia and Neil Luck; installations and visual arts Ania Von Bauer, Jessica Levy, Seecum Chung, the UK Unknown and Dimitris Papadatos amidst a backdrop experimental sounds from Sound Through, the ARCO Collective and Bristol’s best in performative poetics.
As the natural essence ceases to breath, the dream of the city dies and the self becomes enslaved through striving to grasp. Chasing the dream, the present, the questions of return are suspended enduring a navigation modulated through the negotiation of career, guilt and distraction. A chronicle of disappearance; defaced intimacy and the sedimented scars of dysfunctional interlocution; questions of the return of the natural essence, digging into the sense of civil inhabitation, notions of rootedness become ambiguous.
WELCOME TO THE TOUR DE BORD
Searching the hiding places amongst secret hierarchies or in observation of those dwelling, invisible, maintaining the vestibules and corridors of the interwoven tapestry which makes up our city; The Tour de Bord explores the creeping connectivity of our contemporary urban world amidst a tombstone abandoned, like a marker to the memory of our own infrastructural positions.
The Tour de Bord project seeks to set up, facilitate and support interdisciplinary collaborative work upon a semi-open platform, providing practitioners with the opportunity to develop their practice across a range of different themes and for implementation in broad range of both formal and diverse venue spaces. This platform focused particularly on the integration of visual and performing arts spaces and a general application of new media arts with an emphasis on integrity of presence.
Through exploring a range of specific research criteria across the curatorial and collaborative practices and developing and reimplementing research into the spatial consequence of working in both formal and diverse venue spaces, on artworks and the affect on the production process of the different limitations on practice and various business protocols encountered whilst working with sites from different sectors. Such scope also provides opportunities for creative practitioners to work with and gain experience from others working in different areas of the connected industries, such a slighting, multimedia, build, programming and health and safety protocol.
DEATH IN THE METROPOLIS saw the conversion of an empty and filthy industrial estate change into an arts venue with security precautions, a PA and lighting systems, a sturdy functioning bar and assortment of venue furniture built from the crates, metal barrels and other industrial detris, built and installed in 6 hours on site.
The event also provided opportunity to experience a synthesis of guerilla production – with very limited and demanding get in / out phases and the challenges of working with the limited power source. Themes and limitations were introduced through successive meetings at which different practitioners were introduced to one-another and were able to hear and reflect on the challenges and plans of production development for non arts venues. Following a theory that through the process, the seemingly haptic rhythms and migration, whilst elaborated become less wild and progress into an opportunities for more structured performances capable of reacting to demands on short production time.
