Video Excerpts – DVD #2

Documentation from a deep dive into La Pocha Nostra’s archive held at LADA’s Study Room on 5th July 2024, led by artist Ansuman Biswas who has been collaborating with La Pocha Nostra and its founder Guillermo Gómez-Peña since 2002.

This is a video file. For a version with closed captions please visit our vimeo channel. 

Documentation from an online lecture by Ron Athey on Penetration in Live Art and Video. This lecture formed part of LADA’s 2020 Summer Programme.

Penetration – be it bodily, spiritual or sexual – is a recurring motif in Ron Athey‘s work. In this lecture, which comes as he begins work on a new project, Athey will explore the artistic potential of the contemporary post-porn movement in relation to his practice.

Video documentation of an online artist conversation with  Rosalind Fowler, Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter  in December 2021. This conversation followed an online screening of BREADROCK, I feel like doing this, a film by artist collective Fourthland (Isik Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) and artist and filmmaker Rosalind Fowler.

BREADROCK, I feel like doing this is a visceral homage to cultural history, memory and universal myth.  Melding experimental and ethnographic filmmaking, the work presents a series of staged vignettes drawing on the rituals and artefacts of the Estate’s Bangladeshi, European, Kurdish, Serbian, Turkish, Ugandan and West Indian communities, to create new kinships, myths and culture.

Audio documentation of a participatory conversation in response to La Pocha Nostra’s commitment to use performativity as a methodology of resistance and to erase the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, and artist and spectator, on 2nd August 2024  at The Garrett Centre.

performingborders has been exploring performance and Live Art practices across notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders since 2016, inspired by La Pocha Nostra’s work. Drawing from Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s publication Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back (2000), they explored LADA Study Room’s resources around borders and performances, including the Performing Borders Study Room Guide. They also drew from their own archive to highlight artists whose practices challenge the diversity of experiences at the intersections of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, economic, and everyday borders.

This is an audio file. For a version with closed captions, please visit out vimeo channel. 

Performance making is a mode of enquiring about culture and a strategy to respond to societal emergencies. Collective acts of thought and expression are an existential urgency as they broaden our understanding of who we are. As the world grappled with lockdowns, fear has permeated our very beings. Notes from Isolation embodies an investigative journey wherein Andrea Pagnes —who, with Verena Stenke, forms the artist duo VestAndPage— explores the essence of existence during the COVID-19 pandemic. He then shares his notes in distant encounters with artists, poets and philosophers friends who navigate the non-linear realms: Marilyn Arsem, Lois Keidan, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Franko B, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stelarc, Timothy Morton, Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, and eventually Ron Athey revisiting a conversation they had a while ago. At last, performance matters: politics and science to dissect, recurring patterns of suffering and pain to surpass, religion, colonialism, and gender fluidity found a voice within the societal crises that COVID-19 accentuated. Multiple remote visions and divergent creative thinking are pooled to inspect reality while caring for humanity, as to perhaps find a way out.

‘They close the glass door behind me and say I cannot leave this area. They gave me a blue protective mask and said I must wear it whenever I exit the room or someone enters it. The mask I have to wear closes my mouth but not my eyes. The border is a transparent glass door. We can look to the other side but not cross over. I let go a quiet steeping in being. Time makes me the process.’ — Verena Stenke.

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.

P.27-35
Nizan Shaked traces the interventions of Sonia Boyce’s work in received categories of artistic practice, considering how these interventions suggest means of classification beyond media, artistic intention and identity.

Training Utopias

Performance Research Volume 25 Issue No. 8 December 2020

Pg9-10

On Ageing (&Beyond)

Performance Research Volume 24 Issue No 3 April/May 2019

pg 40-48

Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 32 Issue Number 1 February 2022

p46-60

Contemporary Theatre Review Volume 31 Issue Number 3 August 2021

Applying a queer phenomenology to unpack the importance of a multiplicity of Self/s, the book guides readers to be academically rigorous when capturing embodied experiences, featuring exercises to activate their practices and clear introductory definitions to key phenomenological terms. Includes interviews and insights from some of the best examples of transgressive performance art practice of this century help to help unpack the application of phenomenology as Bacon calls for a queer reimagining of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’

Featuring conversations, essays, drawings and photographs, Bodies of Knowledge(Ed. Laura Purseglove) reflects and builds on an interdisciplinary project involving artists, amateur and professional dancers, wrestlers, members of a trans community group and academic researchers interrogating how our bodies are both produced by and productive of knowledges.