58 Shelmerdine Close

2010-10-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE  

Over 7 weekends in autumn 2010, a unique series of 7 Live Art "Acts" set out to deconstruct private space and social reality, under the watchful eye of a participatory guest audience.

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE has now come to an end and the door to 58 Shelmerdine once more closes. 
 
Tanya Cottingham, the tenant, artist, instigator, and curator would like to thank all those involved in this extraordinary venture.

ACT 1:

2010-10-04T06:57:00.000-07:00

Mind the Wrap

Catriona Robertson

In response to the ever increasing concerns of heath and safety regulations imposed by institutions, an entire home is symbolically wrapped, the space, the furnishings, even the guests. This epic installation uses packaging suggestive of the restrictions that these rules create. By wrapping the space and the viewer each is protected from one another in an attempt to resolve any potential risk...

Catriona Robertson is an emerging artist recently graduated from Central Saint Martin's where she specialsed in Sculpture. Catriona has exhibited and performed in venues across London including Bankside Gallery, Mumford Fine Art, 93 Feet East, the Foundry, the Queen of Hoxton, 491 Gallery, Trinity Buoy Wharf, the Wallis Gallery, Cochrane Theatre as well as on the Turbine Hall Bridge (Tate Modern) at the Raw Canvas Tate Takeover event in October 2009.

ACT 2:

2010-10-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

hysteria

Tanya Cottingham

Lotan Sapir
Diane Neufeld
Ruth Marchewicz
Dafne Louzioti

...at that hour, (an autumnal afternoon), we are not sure she knows we are there. watching. we wait. she disbelieves in herself.  she applies a set of masks in the rooms that manifest her as a masquerade. Upstairs, she is hyper-delight. Uber-woman, all veneer. The kitchen and boudoir demand it of her. The stair leads down towards her dark failings. We descend, following guiltily.

Tanya Cottingham left Middlesex University with a BA in Fine Art. After realising her mistake she set up the collective LOSS OF FEELING AND/OR SENSATION running the month long Soup of the Day in Brixton Village Market in 2004 (with thanks to ASC Studios and Arts Unwrapped), Baptism 2005, The Laundry 2006 and Art Monopoly 2007. She has worked with and designed for: Punchdrunk, The Hobbs Factory, High Tide Festival, Thorpe Park and many more. She has designed public art works for county councils and currently instigates fringe happenings in her Bow Arts flat. The first event there was HOUSEWARMING in 2009. Followed by 7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

ACT 3:

2010-10-04T06:50:00.000-07:00

Home Alone

HELSINKI SYNDROME

Rachel Hynes

Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Vanessa Hammick, Daniela Bitzi, Ana Rivera, Tugba Tamer, Yuriria Fanjul, Alex Lehman, Sarah Boesen, Katie Chavez, Gaidig Mercier, Fleur Poad

Home Alone: The past most comes to haunt us in the privacy of our own homes. These ghosts, ever present, but most visible at twilight, bring us love, disgrace, fear, anguish, and comfort. The bi-oceanic performance group Helsinki Syndrome offers you the opportunity to spend the afternoon home alone. 

HELSINKI SYNDROME is an experimental, avant-garde performance group led by artists Rachel Hynes + Mike Pham presenting non-linear ensemble driven performance pieces, incorporating their trademark hybrid of theater, movement, and imagination into bold new works. Through research, experimentation, and collaboration, each new work results in a collage of multiple points of view that examines the complexities of human behavior and individual isolation through a common theme or mutual obsession.

Helsinki Syndrome has previously premiered new works as a part of On the Boards’ NW New Works Festival, Annex Theatre (Seattle, WA); Risk/Reward Festival of New Performance (Portland, OR); Ontological-Hysteric Incubator (New York); Camden People’s Theatre SPRINT Festival (London, UK); and in collaboration with The Henry Art Gallery, Instant Coffee and Grand Openings.

ACT 4:

2010-10-04T06:48:00.000-07:00

Hospital at Home

Martin O'Brien
Sarah Ruff

Hospital at Home reflects on the discipline and brutality of modern medicine which aims at cure through discipline. For those with chronic illnesses the home is not only a place to live but also one, like the hospital, in which a disciplined medical regime is imposed with often painful treatments taking place. Hospital at Home is a four hour site responsive performance taking place in a flat which is soon to be demolished. The flat is filled with excessive images of destruction performed by Martin O'Brien, conversant with those of the hospital and beckoning towards the inevitable fate of the flat and ultimately the bodies that occupy it. Hospital at Home examines the fear and stigma associated with medicine and hospitals through a transgressive presentation of the body, disrupting the binaries of health and illness.

Martin O'Brien's practice focuses on physical endurance and excess in relation to the fact he suffers from Cystic Fibrosis, a severe chronic disease in which the body produces excess mucus that, amongst other things, works to restrict and prevent breathing through clogging up of the airways and lungs.

O’Brien’s practice includes a daily regime designed from imposed medical treatments and preparatory exercises for his work, investigating the convergence between the condition of his body and his body based performance practice. 

Martin O'Brien has performed in venues in Britain, Poland, Germany, Spain and Norway and his work has been described in Real Time Australia as ‘Utterly compelling… a real tour de force’. He has recently run a Live Art Development Agency (LADA) DIY 7 project entitled ‘Altered States’ at Colchester Arts Centre and is currently working on a new commission from LADA as part of Restock, Rethink, Reflect 2: Live Art and Disability. He was a contributor to ‘Victim Art: Plague, Performance and Metaphor’ as part of Ron Athey’s residency at the centre for the history of emotions (2010), Queen Mary University London and artist in residence at Gallery Art Claims Impulse, Berlin in 2008. 

Martin's work will be documented through a series of artists pages in a special forthcoming edition of Contemporary Theatre Review on Live Art in the UK. He is currently engaged in an AHRC funded PhD at the University of Reading on endurance based performance.

ACT 5:

2010-10-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

 
Dis-place-ment

Xristina Penna

Julieta Kilgelmann  

I know this, I do this all the time (I don't like it though)

An interactive Live Art installation by the aswespeak project

This piece is an investigation of the manifold faces, masks and skins of our individuality and identity in relation to the "Other". It questions how the contemporary urban environment restricts real human interaction and explores it’s effect on our ability to process information and attempt expression. The artist explores the fragile connection, or violent disjuncture, between the experience of the body, and the perception of the “Other.” The piece unearths the patterns that shape the space of the self, the messages and images that invade, embed and collude on our encounter with the Other. The Main tool of this piece is a device, which allows the watcher to draw on a piece of paper while her/his action is recorded and projected on the performer’s visage. The doer, over a period of three hours, collects each of the audience’s drawings which gradually overtake her private territory...with dire results.

Xristina Penna has been working internationally as a designer for theatre, opera and performance, as an art director and performance maker. Her practice consists of creating visual environments by blurring contemporary reality with dreamy states that relate to the uncanny and focuses on the reality of living within an urban landscape and its impact on our ability to process information and attempt expression. Her work is cross-disciplinary and has as principal focus to create a collective, archetypal language that communicates visually

Currently, Xristina is:
:- the artistic director of the aswespeakproject creating mixed media and installation work.
:- Creator/designer with associate artist Julieta Kilgelmann for I Know This, I Do This All The Time (I don’t Like It Though), an interactive performance installation, Shunt Vaults and Area 10 London 2009, Byzantine Museum, Athens 2009, Benaki Museum of Modern Art, Athens 2010 as part of Locus Solus by Outofthebox Intermedia.

Previous  works:
:-Site specific designer for Black Tonic by The Other Way Works, Manchester 2008. :-Designer/associate artist for A Kiss From The Last Red Squirrel by Elyssa Livergant and Rough Memory, CPT, Shunt Vaults 2008, Spill Festival 2009. :- Founding member of Poemstomyotherself, a collective of visual and theatre artists: artistic director/designer for Holes by Gabriella Svenningsen, Round Chapel, London 2007. :-Event designer for Metropolis by Future Cinema, Fabric, London 2006.
Xristina has an MA in Scenography from Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design and a BA from the School of Drama, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.


 
Hedva Eltanani
Sara Gianfrate

Be@Home – The tea room 

This is a private tea party. It is subjected to transformation and transition of space and its extention via internet and pervasive technology. Bringing the public into a private tea party transforms and extends the tea room. The room changes and the rules change with it.The rules and actions are repeated every 20-30 min. However each time brings a different element which develops the work as a whole.
The interchanges are made with cardboardboxes and with the usage of diferent interfaces and websites such as Facebook and blogging. 

You can join our party either via a private invitation to the tea party or online. 

Follow us: 

http://tracingthesite.blogspot.com/ 

Hedva Eltanani and Sara Gianfrate graduated MA Advanced Theatre Practice from Central school of Speech and Drama. They are questioning the space and the places in between them. Using digital technology they explore the extension of space and of live performance. 

Hedva presented her research in Reading University, Brunel University, TaPRA conference in Cardiff University. She collaborated with companies such as 19;29, Ashes and Diamonds and Flying Dutchman. Sara's recent collaborations include: ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ by Punchdrunk;‘We don’t own it’,Laban Institute a device installation based on collecting memories;‘The Cherry Orchard’ by The Galleon Theatre Company  and‘Crime and Punishment’ by Ashes and Diamonds

Andrello Jones

Distinct from our prescribed social roles based on the utility of space present in other public and private environments - visitor, customer, employee, traveller - the realm of home primarily demands that we simply exist within. Thus occupation becomes the raison d'etre for the domestic space and with it the martial connotations that accompany it. What happens when 'home' becomes a stage, a set, a battleground?

Borja Sagasti  

This Live Art performance explores the notion of anonymity in the city through the body and the virtual.

ACT 6:

2010-10-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

The Intimate, The Unspoken,
The Remembered.


Dafne Louzioti

Katharine Fry 

Vanio Papadelli
Bruno Humberto
Nicole Dimitrakopoulou

This place is not real. It is a half-dreamed network of exhumed memories and desires perforating the thin film of assumed reality. The walls are falling, the paint is falling, the chairs are falling. If you step inside can you read the map(s) left behind? If you listen carefully can you hear the walls whisper their secrets?

This is the story of a handkerchief, the moon and two cups of coffee forgotten on the window ledge or what happens when loneliness sinks into the flesh.

This is the story of a man is wandering through his archive of remembrance and forgetfulness.

This is a story of a woman who has lost her name and too much dirty laundry.

This is the story of a moment we once shared.

ACT 7:

2010-10-04T06:05:00.000-07:00

Elizia Volkmann

Karen Heald 

If there is one thing that the BBC taught us it was to remember that you are a Womble and the Mice on the Mouse Organ living with the fear that they may be reds under your bed, that your small life could yet be lit by a light brighter than a thousand suns and cleared away forever, but maybe not, if you hid under a table or clothes horse covered in blankets. Becalm yourself with stories and find uses for an old washing up bottle, combined with your mother's laddered tights, go and hunt another world in the wardrobe, but only find forgotten stuff, oh well one should take heart that these things can be put to good use.  The things that everyday folk leave behind can become priceless art, but time is running out, and even though we moved here to belong, those who came to the East End never belong and soon it will be time to go taking memories, songs and stories with us as we've always carried with us wherever we go.

Once the everyday folk just left stuff behind, abandoned it now they freecycle it or, they either flog it or freecycle it and of course artists are making good use of going to pick things up, further their careers and then flog it, but for the good ladies of K&E that won't do either, if the everyday folk give us the raw materials the good ladies of K&E will multiply it, telling stories, recording, remembering it inviting you to take away souvenirs and memories to break bread and share something in these few short moments.
Art is for everyone, and so the the priceless is PRICE-LESS!

Watch this space and a free-cycle group near you for your invitation to view the less than ordinary art made by the good ladies of K&E and book your appointment to pick up your Price-less work of art!

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

2010-09-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Call for Live Art Submissions

Violate - verb: to act in disregard of laws, rules, contracts, or promises, to fail to agree with, to be in violation of rules or patterns, to go against; break, fly in the face of, fly in the teeth of.

Where is art/s sting?

The Panopticon nods its approval as its artists enhance the urban experience, perpetuating a sociability that restricts real human interaction. Limiting, diluting. The only free territory left is the artist's home, a site potent for anything.

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE is a series of artists' works subtle (in form) yet powerful (in effect). These seven acts explore Live Art and intervention as tools to pierce private territory, seeking to deconstruct the functions of the home. Away from the watchful eye and rule set of socially accepted behaviours, notions of encounter, conformity, control and consent are investigated. Home becomes a re-thinking place, an art-thinking space, a new envelope for social realities.

7 Quiet Acts takes place in 58 Shelmerdine Close in London's East End, an artist's home waiting for demolition. A new government(s) has resulted in a temporary stay of execution, leaving this home/non-home as a dysfunctional waiting space, a non-time and non-place.

For the series 7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, the Bow Arts tenant invites the use of this private site as a territory able to stand outside of the restrictions of institutionalised space, and outside of constraints imposed by social reality. As societies' rules step aside at the door, 58 Shelmerdine Close becomes a site of resistance. A new Art Testing Centre emerges, and a place for dreaming. Here art that enhances (perpetuates) can be replaced by art that violates (deconstructs).

Bachelard reminds us that the house preceded the universe, while Lefebvre urges artists to produce new spaces that house new ideologies. More recently Bourriaud states that reality can only be defined as a product of negotiation. 58 Shelmerdine Close thus becomes a potent instrument, a home becomes the site for its own deconstruction. This private space opens up as a new time/space, producing unforeseen paths and codes, a site where collaborators devise new experiences and audiences police them. New agendas are set in this trial institution, this re-reality.

For seven consecutive Saturdays beginning October 16th 2010, a series of time-based acts are invited into the artists home. Each weekend one new artist or group intervenes in the building's fabric, its functions and the tenants life. The project seeks experimental Live Art and interventionist pieces, encouraging thinking outside of the square.

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE asks collaborators to consider can an interventionist act invited into the home be valid. It asks can the edges of experience be found inside the mundane and the domestic that is hidden behind closed doors. During this series of acts, the project asks how can an audience shape production of the invited works? Each show re-animates the relationship between authorship and ownership, participant and beholder, realities normally kept apart. New forms of relations are explored within this private Panopticon.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Tanya Cottingham the artist/instigator and Bow Arts tenant invites artist's proposals, including a short biog, a summary of the form the work will take, details of how this act punctures private harmony and an explanation of how the audience directly affects the resultant piece. Please also provide links to previous works.

Each artist/group will have one weeks access to the building in advance of the show. Door security will be provided for each Saturday show which runs from 2.30-6.30pm. Proposals should specify availability for individual Saturday slots between October 16th and November 27th.

7 Quiet ACTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE will allocate a limited number of private invitations to its participatory audience members. Entry for this private series of shows is very limited and is strictly by invitation only, there will be no access without a valid invitation. Please contact Tanya specifying which weekend is applicable and the quantity of invitations required.

For submissions, invitation requests and any further questions regarding the project please contact Tanya at:

thexecutivebaglady@yahoo.co.uk

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS is midnight 30th SEPTEMBER. Audience application is rolling.

(Addendum)

PRIVACY

International privacy laws are undecided as to the extent an individual has in terms of freedom in their own home. Definitions pertaining to privacy rights include "physical space, where (the individual) can be free from interruption, intrusion, embarrassment or accountability" (Robert Ellis Smith, Editor of Privacy Journal). Other definitions cite dignity, secrecy, anonymity and solitude of both body and its territory.

HOUSEWARMING

2009-09-01T11:20:00.000-07:00

In medieval times a HOUSEWARMING was when the hot embers from the previous home were brought to the new premises. A fire was started from the embers in the grate of the new home.

HOUSEWARMING

"Openness in being occurs in the form of a world, that is a field, a topography, where nothing visible shows itself without hiding most of itself." Merleau Ponty

HOUSEWARMING takes place in an East End council flat waiting for demolition.

HOUSEWARMING is an experiential piece that takes audience members on a journey through the hidden life of a building, questioning the criteria upon which the end of its existence has been decided.

When can a building be destroyed and what kind of impact do these policies have on its residents' lives? As a consequence of these decisions, what can the traces left by forced migrating bodies tell us?

Within the spacial realm of performance and installation, four artists respond to how the tenants' lives have been affected by policy making. Stifled past voices are given a moment to speak, rippling underneath, unarticulated, invisible yet most potent...

The artists, the temporary new tenants, bring with them their own customs that for the final time, overwrite the last layer of cultural reference before the building is destroyed.

Date: September 11th 2009
Time: 7pm-10pm,
Venue: 58 Shelmerdine Close, Ackroyd Drive, E3.

Nearest Station: Mile End

ADMISSION FREE

With thanks to: BOW ARTS TRUST

2009-09-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

helen elizabeth cocker's postings

2009-09-01T03:06:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 1st September.

Somehow it seemed appropriate to begin on the first.

Although unplanned..... as things often are, in resonance.

Strangely I start my entrance into this space from another empty space.

A family home, occupied all year round except for these few days when its inhabiters are away on holiday.

These inhabiters have left the home which once was mine, and so it is to some extent a "return" I am part of. Here, in this lived-life house, I find the remnants of my past. Oddly disembodied from my present.

Here I return to a time, preserved by my trace.

For now this is all, a substantial entry will appear here soon.

This post will act as my way in - a door if you like.

Everyone needs a door into a space, especially when blinded by the walls.

These sentences are my door, to remind me that as the day of 58 Shelmerdine Close draws nearer to me, so must I draw nearer to it.

Let me not forget then, that the personal is a space saturated within the empty.

tanya and christian's posting

2009-09-01T02:00:00.000-07:00

in the midst of slow motion
essence, sense and signification
are the experiences of the limit itself

the experience of being within an outside.

An act

the stillness of the past tense of a room. emptied. the sounds are echoes. enlarged echoes even. the silence is an echo enlarged.

two figures dance in their joint solitude. swaying movement that could even be stillness. the intention.

they wear patina on their feet. the smell of wax. the smell of old. oldness. they dance slowly. circling. waxing. polishing.

the floors tiles are scuffed and broken. the floors have no value. or rather are deemed valueless. so to preserve them is a pointless act.

the sound is from somewhere within. cupboard. interior. mind. interior. the wrecking ball. the first dull deep thud cannot be undone. inevitable next. pendulum. the couple dance on...
with no power to present what in the present has no name

images and bodies of images are dissolved
control as we know, on the other hand
always finds itself

in the last instance
on the separation
between naked existences

the exception, is what the control itself
each and every time decides

naked life is put into question
...revoked

the subject that needs to be turned into the exception is always naked
there are no distinctions between strategies and situation

artificial light and nocturnal inclination
unqualified witnesses

a temporary tenant - tanya's thread...

2009-08-25T02:39:00.000-07:00

enter the space. silence.

it moves me around like subtle hands.
i close shut the door and pray.

First

I saw you first on a potent day. Echoing space of mouldy bread rolls. That night i dreamt of the white flush of light from your windows. rows. shouldering. i performed on those plush velour sofas. an act of my white skin on your red wound. Whilst seated there, i found my way again.

the second time

photos to pin down that laughter dancing around our renewal

third

the always smell of piss
this days sun spilling
brushes my floor and my walls
and my ceilings
can i ever own you?

4

i have been given a new lease of life
because of your dereliction
your loss is my gain...

each action becomes a question (i scrape away glue from the lino that held firm the carpet) each action asks me its intention. an act of practicality. a function. an act of desire or an act performed by a puppet. dangling helplessly from her strings.

POWER LESS

as the building sits tight in the grip of the hang-mans noose, the wrecking ball anticipates. ticks out time. the mocking tick of a clock defacing calendar pages. there is less time already. and less now.

does the fabric of the building feel its impending end? i feel its loss. i hear the ticking prelude to the pendulums first swing.

the space stands silent. dumb witness? once container? if i listen very hard i CAN hear the heartbeat. in the afternoon heat the metal security grids warp and vibrate a single dull dead pan note from deep in its soul.

what can this place tell us anyway? listen. the building does speak. its empty rooms whisper. my echoing footfalls span the past and future.

here sits an hour glass with sand grains. the glass cannot be turned. smoothly the grains pour through. finite, without choice.

HOW CAN A BUILDING BE CONSIDERED?

a shield, a skin, a perimeter fence between the outside and the in.

a canvas, our bodies rewriting the space. histories brought from distant lands and woven into the sheer fabric of the walls. ghee covers the tiles in the kitchen. new skin, which i peel away.

A BUILDING ON DEATH ROW

these rooms are mothers, that nurtured lives, (now stripped bare, humiliated, left kneeling meekly before the gallows).

this private space of intimacy

the carcass as raw wounds

a tragedy

the building is victim.. gagged. let us give it a moment to speak. THE LAST REQUEST IT HAS IS UTTERANCE.

THE ACT OF CLEANING, THE BODIES MARK MAKING

cleaning. spring cleaning. the act of renewal. re-invigorating.

dereliction. the act of decay. stagnation. degeneration.

demolish. destroy.

re-decorate. re-CLASS-ify.

i work avidly in my condemned rooms, cleaning, refreshing, invigorating. acts essentially futile.

the end always begins at the start

we might have been here

might not

have

been.

you.

inspired me to live again

then killed

me.