Utopia: Three Plays for a Postdramatic Theatre

The trilogy of novels by Samuel Beckett is his best known work outside the theatre, dating from the same period as Waiting for Godot, and as such is central to the main body of his work. This new edition has been corrected from the errors that appeared in some previous editions. Many people believe it to be the most important volume of prose in the English language after Joyce’s Ulysses, although written originally in French, a language that the author adopted to escape from the richness of Irish speech rhythms.

Most critics today consider the trilogy to be Beckett’s major achievement, more controlled than the brilliant early work, more easily readable than the complex How It Is and the later plays and texts. Malloy has two parts, the parallel narratives of the old Molloy, passing time by telling himself stories and remembering his past journeys, and of the waspish Moran, a private detective sent to find him, whose deterioration during his quest bears a strange similarity to Molloy’s. Malone Dies appears to be a continuation of Molloy’s narrative, only this time the speaker knows that the end is almost at hand. The additional poignancy of the stories he tells himself is largely related to the sense of time running our, and the prose seems heightened from the earlier book. In the third novel The Unnamable, the narrator, again under a different name or names, is aware of the approaching silence and tries to keep it at bay with thoughts, reveries, stories and inventions. The prose undergoes a complete change as we find ourselves listening to the sounds of panic, written in a punctuation of the human breath that the narrator has ever greater difficulty in drawing into his lungs, while the mind races giddily ever faster. The end is terrifying, bu t finishes, strangely, on a note of hope. Molloy has been translated by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author, the rest of the trilogy by Mr Beckett himself.

This book is a sampler of Quarantine’s work since we started in November 1998. Every word and image is from our archive. Some of the material originated with us, the rest was written or spoken with us, the rest was written or spoken by others. The pages may seem disparate, contradictory even; they are fragments of over 20 years, more projects, many voices.

We’ve realised over the years that our work is a form of portraiture. This sampler is a kind of self-portrait of Quarantine.

Still, this house is better than me. It’s going to be torn down and each piece scattered, but it will become something else. The wood will become desks, tables… Now it’s time to empty this house. – Snow in March

If you want to find yourself, there is only one way. Kill anyone who reminds you of you even if just a little. Someone who reminds you of your past, present, and future, all of them are your enemies! They will confuse you, ruin you, take away your freedom, estrange you from this world, and in the end, bury you alive. – The Master Has Come

The baby is my scar. A symbol of my hopeless future. But I don’t consider my scar or my bleak future a bad thing. I don’t regret anything. Though I chose a different path, at least I chose it. It was my choice. I don’t care how things turn out. Even if the end of that destructive path is death, I’ll accept it. Because I chose it. – Red Bus

Playing Public: Performing Participation with Pens, Planes, and People is an A5 format artist/research publication and project archive focusing on participatory game Flight Club and the years that preceded its creation. Charting my participatory art journey from prior experiments and involvement with community groups and public-facing, performative events leading up to the production of Flight Club and its iterations, written and photographic documentation combine to show how this game emerged and developed through participation, community and open-source collaboration.

The reinforcements mounted by our profane masters have transformed the theatre into a boulevard or, closer to home, into a good-old thoroughfare. In other words, the theatre is a space that hasn’t changed at all. We have to reinforce its mountainous profanities yet again, a little less old-fashioned perhaps, but similarly escorted by those necessary moralists-in-mind and a concomitant mania for marvels. So, here we are.

My dramas- in which I seem to lean on the ludicrous which must be kept so, in order to be accountable, the inspiration of such a work being precisely its utter and insulting reality-must not be born of ‘today’ but of the spells and numerologies of the old masters, the drowsy and doddery in their chic flannel slippers and their well-practised blandishment.

Before we begin to practice self-design, we find ourselves already designed by the gaze of others. That is why the practice of self-design mostly takes a critical and confrontational turn. We want to bring others to see us in the way we want to be seen – not only during our earthly life but also after our death. This is a complicated struggle, and the aim of this book is to describe and analyze it.

Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened documents neon, LED and other text works by the British artist Tim Etchells. The book creates a compelling and comprehensive investigation of Etchells’ projects in public space and galleries, leading with images of key works installed in sites all over the world.

Alongside its wide-ranging image survey, this work features an extended conversation between the artist and Jule Hillgärtner, director of Kunstverein Braunschweig, as well as a text by curator Ben Borthwick.

Surveying the full range and approaches of Etchells’ sculptural work with text, Let’s Pretend None of This Ever Happened creates dialogue across the artist’s works spanning sixteen years, as well as exploring the complex relation between individual works and the different contexts in which they have been installed over the last several decades.

A critical exploration of the creative practice, socio-historical context and cultural impact of multifaceted artist Leigh Bowery. Engaging with Bowery’s key looks and live art through a variety of disciplines and challenging research contexts, Sofia Vranou navigates costuming as a performative strategy that blurs the boundaries between art and life.

Thought-provoking and enlightening, the study investigates his aesthetics of freakishness and narcissistic desire as well as his fascination with extremity, hybrid embodiments and trans-queer visual language, establishing Bowery as a radical figure in contemporary perfromance and queer visual culture.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg. 59-67

In Acts of Affect, siren eun young jung returns to the disappearing Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatre. In her discussion of the project, Ashley Chang examines how masculinity is produced by women.

Afterall Journal

Issue 49 Spring/Summer 2020 – ‘Extractivism’ – looks at a nexus of practices engaging with environmental issues and extractivist capitalism. In parallel, it covers alternative ways in which artists are occupying spaces of art, history or economics.

pg.49-57

Hyunjin Kim contextualises siren eun young jung’s audio-visual work at the 2019 Venice Biennale in relation to queer performance in South Korean history.