PROGRAMME

- Eleni Zervou "Dollhouse on Fire" Clothing Showcase

- Robin Mackay “By the North Sea” 60’ audio film

- Conversation between Robin Mackay, Mattin and Eleni Zervou

- Interpretation of the Social Dissonance score by Mattin and Eleni Zervou with the audience

"As a noise artist and improviser, Bilbao's Mattin has been as uncompromising in his struggle against aesthetic convention as anyone in those fields." - Paul Rekret on his review of Social Dissonance, The Wire

The musician, performance artist and noise theorist Mattin will present his new book Social Dissonance, published by Urbanomic, including a performative interaction with the audience.

Mattin’s work in the field of noise and improvisation seeks to address the social and economic structures of experimental music production through live performance, recordings and writing. Social Dissonance is the discrepancy between what we do (buying and selling commodities) and what we believe about ourselves as non-commodified entities. In shifting the emphasis from the sonic to the social, we discover that social dissonance is the territory within which we already find ourselves, the condition we inhabit. In order to deal practically with this, Mattin scored social dissonance as part of documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. For 180 days four players used members of the audience as instruments, who then hear themselves and reflect on their own conception and self-presentation. The score Social Dissonance claims that, by amplifying alienation in performance and participation can enable us a new understanding of structural alienation.

Eleni Zervou

"Dollhouse on Fire" Clothing Showcase; Featuring wearable prints of Eleni Zervou’s original airbrushed drawings from the series “BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU”. Everything will be for up sale.

Robin Mackay
By the North Sea

With the voices of Phyllida Nash as Echidna Stillwell, Peter Marinker as Templeton’s Assistant, S.T. Joshi as H.P. Lovecraft, Stuart Bacon, Lisa Blanning, Angus Carlyle, and Morgan Caines

“In the week immediately following the death of Mark Fisher in 2017, I returned to the archives of a project that Mark and I had embarked upon to make a film about Dunwich, the East Anglian town that disappeared into the sea. In 2001 we took one trip to Dunwich during which we filmed and conducted interviews, but it went no further. We periodically talked about reviving the project but it never happened.

The Dunwich Project became a focus for asking questions about finality, about things that could now never happen, about the possibility of continuing, and about a distant friendship marked by depressive absences and constantly deferred promises to spend time together. I soon realised that I was returning to what had already been an attempt at the repetition or recovery of an intensity of engagement and creativity that had met with an abrupt end, and which we must both have felt the loss of.

In this ‘definitively unfinished’ audio version, our actual trip to Dunwich becomes just one timeline in a convergent wave of intensity. Across a series of embedded hyperstitional narrative shells, what emerges is a common task pursued by Stillwell (1949), by Templeton (1968), by the two of us (2001), and then by myself in the wake of Mark’s death (2017). A search for a mode of time where nothing passes definitively but can, with the correct procedures, be accessed, resynthesised, recast, producing something new and unprecedented.”
—Robin Mackay