No.4: Notations
In the spaces delineated between Myung Mi Kim’s words, Mount Rundle’s strata, Roni Horn’s birds and Mary Helena Clark’s fleeting objects and sounds, lie potent silences full of the unarticulated, the unsayable, the unknown and the lingering presence of the no-more. – SJW Myung Mi Kim, accumulation of land (2009) https://undeadmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Untitled-design.mp4 Myung Mi Kim […]
No.12: Stillness, Mimicry
Continued… Tonic Immobility, Self Mimesis, Apparent Death, Thanatosis, or Playing Dead. Figure Minus Fact (constellation No.4: Notations) includes images of plant and animal mimicry, where insects become space via camouflage, or in the case of the shark, self-mimesis, where the shark mimics itself, dead, conjuring its inevitable future. Here stillness alludes to becoming an image, […]
No.11: Mimicry, Stillness
Eva-Maria Houben, Breath For Organ (2018) A piece which composes breath that expresses ‘how many ways sound can disappear.’ Vibration nearing stillness, at the edge of perception. How does the organ sound decay? – MHC https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ys6JJ1DbFtw Presence – Silence – Disappearance Some thoughts on the perception of ‘nearly nothing’ Yesterday there was my piano recital […]
No. 6: Syncopation
Syncopation: this is not to be confused with the term’s musical association in ideas of harmonious fusion or amalgamation but an important space that leads to ways of looking and hearing that dismantle a linear trajectory, instead revealing contradiction, fluctuation and uncertainty. This is a space where things get mirky and parameter lines are made […]
No. 7: Syncopation #2
A Time is Away Herbal Emma Dabiri, Don’t Touch My Hair (2020) ‘In opposition to custom, Mbembe insists that the idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed and reminds us there is a pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity. Boom! African cultures tend to be syncretic. While all cultures bleed, […]
No. 6: Syncopation
>Play< Time is Away asks: if gardens are the answer, what is the question? A Time is Away Herbal I’m really interested in the shape shifting format of these shows and their experimental approach to archive. This episode.. ‘surfaces the entangled, often traumatic colonial and imperial histories of plants and gardens, while tending the green […]
No.8.: Becoming
No. 8.: Becoming Around 500BC Heraclitus wrote: ‘As the same thing in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.’ – SJW “Decay does not result in an equivocation between putrid and wholesome; it rather […]
No.17: Resurfacing
No. 17. Resurfacing Over many months and seasons, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and I shared conversations about rhythms that resurface in the world around us: cultural, circadian and the intersections between, from music to fruit to geology and back again. Junior works collaboratively with percussionists from different musical backgrounds: rhythms and tempos of differing cultures rub […]
No. 23: Darkness
Flora Parrott | Darkness Retreat, 2021 For Aoife McKim Commissioned by Legion Projects [Credits] Click to enter. Please watch in the dark. Friedrich Engels | Dialectics of Nature (1883) ‘Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun […]
No.15: Sentient Matter
Bo Choy, un/folding in (2016) https://vimeo.com/239975725 Traditions, memory and heritage resurface within the present realm, giving texture and form to the contemporary psyche and social fabric. Read more In a lineage of modern science, we have known since at least Einstein’s theory of special relativity, that ‘now’ doesn’t exist; only ‘here and now’ can be […]