Vauxhall One Supports So remember the liquid ground

Vauxhall One is proudly supporting Gasworks and the Royal College of Art’s new programme So remember the liquid ground.

Launch date: 15th June 2020

Live events and performances: 15th June – 21st June 2020

Vauxhall One is proudly supporting Gasworks and the Royal College of Art’s new programme So remember the liquid ground.

So remember the liquid ground is conceived as a programme of meditative and sensorial experiences across the digital, physical and spiritual realms. The immersive programme features newly commissioned live sound streaming, moving images and performances, contributed by: Soundcamp collective, Myriam Lefkowitz and Julie Laporte, Zoë Marden, Eduardo Navarro, Anna Nazo, Himali Singh Soin and Linda Stupart.

Responding to and expanding from the forgotten social histories and ecologies of Vauxhall in London, the programme has been inspired by the secret and suppressed River Effra, which flows underneath the area. The river acts as a way to re-imagine, navigate, feel, and find ways in which we connect and synchronise with our surroundings.

The title so remember the liquid ground derives from the writings of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray who considers water as a site of possibilities and a force of differentiation.

The immersive programme features Acoustic Commons Underground Test Site, a live sound feed developed by the Soundcamp collective that explores the sounds, tensions, histories and mobilities of the hidden aqueous ecosystems of South London.

Connecting the Effra to its wider ecology, Linda Stupart’s film Watershed begins a mapping of the River Cole in Birmingham. With fictionalised, scientific and historical narratives of water, pollution and contagion, Linda creates an intimate non-division between their body and the river.

The notions of fluidity and interspecies entanglements are further explored in Zoë Marden’s live lecture-performance Mermainia: Tales of Tentacularity. The myths and stories of the mermaid, a hybrid creature that is both animal and human, is central to Zoë’s performance in which she unfolds symbiotic thinking and ways of togetherness across species.

Anna Nazo’s brainwave performance explores the ethics of the technological, together with sympoietic relations through AI poetry and drone performance. The work reflects on themes of otherness, distributed forms of sensuousness and symbiotic relationship with technology.

40 Quarantine Dreams is a short video work that reveals drawings made by artist Eduardo Navarro during the recent lockdown. The gesture of a hand in a moment when touch is precarious and precious lends intimacy and pertinence to the moving image work.

To Tehran in My Dreams by Himali Singh Soin traces the historical development of long-distance communication. Himali’s emotive narrative unfolds the idea that language works like electricity, circuiting from sender to receiver, and that love is a glitch that can disrupt the linear logics of time and capital.

Myriam Lefkowitz Remote Dances is a dance experiment and a one-to-one session, as a means to connect, visualise and come together through physical distance. Myriam is collaborating on this practice with dancer and performer Julie Laporte.

The programme also includes a Reading Room that acts as a circadian space for collective imagining and reflection on the body, with contributions from Clay AD, Helga Schmid, Ignota, PaperWork Magazine and NXS.

The new decade has brought with it a new pandemic, a global crisis that has shattered what we thought we knew about our realities locally and globally. Belonging to a new generation of curators, we feel responsible to contribute to a collective consciousness, one which reconsiders human relations to nature, communities and our surroundings. A collectivity that actively aids in dissolving the schisms between nature and culture, ourselves and others, requires searching for new tools in order to navigate and connect across species, non-visible worlds and technological ontologies. The programme presents artists who are exploring some of these ideas through imagining speculative futures, fluid landscapes and interdependent bodies.

So remember the liquid ground is curated by Benjamin Darby, Yoojin Kang, Akis Kokkinos, Angelina Li, Lenette Lua and Louise Nason as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art in partnership with Gasworks.

It is also generously supported by Vauxhall One.

A physical iteration of the project will be presented in Autumn 2020 in the wider area of Vauxhall.

All events and performances are free of charge.

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