Thursday 19 May 2022, 8pm
Wherever we are we find ourselves choking, trapped in a world we feel we don’t belong to, that is built against us. A world that is going down the drain.
The idea, first formulated by Fredric Jameson and popularised through Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ maxim, that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’ has for a generation summed up the limits of the radical imagination. We are then, seemingly at the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism. Unable to stop it, as if its history has surpassed us, we seem to have missed our opportunity to do something... anything, effective about it. At this point, we must ask ourselves: why are fatalistic and totalising narratives so prevalent in our times?
The response of this book is not a call to order, or a return to rightly questionable ‘universals’, rather it is to reach into and probe the historical mediations which structure capital’s very motor of incorporation and completion, its ability to subsume. Instead the book attempts to identify what remains incomplete about capital’s urge towards totality and completion, and therefore what remains unsubsumed and undetermined under the social relations of capitalism.
PROGRAMME
- Andrés Saenz de Sicilia - solo set
- Anthony Iles, Mattin, Dimitra Kotouza and Andrés Saenz de Sicilia:
Conversation around the book project Abolishing Capitalist Totality:
What Is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption?
- Improvised response to the conversation:
Eddie Prévost / percussion
Elvin Brandhi / electronics
Mattin / computer and audience
Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is a British-Mexican theorist and musician/performer. His projects include Pataphysical (with Camilo Tirado and Matt Linares), Ahorita and collaborations with Walter Maioli, Emiddio Vasquez and Ed Luker, with releases on Good Morning Tapes, 12th Isle, Villa Lontana Records and Sagome.
Anthony Iles is a book editor and writer based in London. He is a founding member of Full Unemployment Cinema and a Contributing Editor with Mute / Metamute,org since 2005. He is the author, with Josephine Berry, of the book, No Room to Move: Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, London 2011), co-author, with Tom Roberts, of All Knees and Elbows (2012) contributing editor to the anthologies, Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis (Archive Books, Berlin, 2015), and Look at Hazards, Look at Losses (Mute/Kuda, 2017). Essays, interviews and reviews by Anthony have been published in the journals Variant, Cesura//Acceso, Mute, Radical Philosophy, Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art and Logos.
Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice and writing he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow). In 2017 he completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier. Along with Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009). In 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing plus interviews and reviews from performances. Anthony Iles and Mattin are currently in the final stages of editing the volume Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Archive Books). Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao and Regler and has over 100 releases in different labels worldwide. He is and currently co-hosting with Miguel Prado the podcast Social Discipline. Mattin took part in 2017 in documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. Urbanomic has just published his book Social Dissonance.
Dimitra Kotouza lectures in sociology and politics at universities in and around London, and is an editorial collective member of the journals Mute and Endnotes. She is a contributor to Beyond Crisis (PM Press 2018, ed. John Holloway et al.) and Biopolitical Governance (Rowman & Littlefield 2018, ed. Hannah Richter). Her writing has also appeared in academic journals and radical publications in English and Greek.
Eddie Prévost began his life in music as a jazz drummer. A recurring interest in this form has been maintained, although always with an experimental ethos. Along the way he has maintained his fifty-year plus experimental credentials with AMM and numerous other improvisation projects, including his now twenty-year long weekly workshop. But drumming has generally been backgrounded to his experimental percussion work. More though, is to be expected of his drumming in 2020 on forthcoming multi-CD album: The Unexpected Alchemy. A part of this Krakow festival recording features the drums and saxophone trio of Ken Vandermark, Hamid Drake, and Eddie Prévost. His most recent released recordings include AMM’s: An Unintended Legacy, and a duo with John Butcher - Visionary Fantasies, both on Matchless Recordings. Also, a solo percussion LP on the Earshots label called Matching Mix. Later, in 2020 he meets with Jason Yarde and Nathan Moore, while in March concerts and recording will hear him drumming with US guitarist Henry Kaiser and saxophonist Binker Golding.
“Prévost's free drumming flows superbly making use of his formidable technique. It’s as though there has never been an Elvin Jones or Max Roach.” - Melody Maker
“Relentlessly innovative yet full of swing and fire.” – Morning Star
Elvin brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales making auto-tune blast beats from field recordings, tapes, instruments and voice. Live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness cavorts with restless, glitched out heaviness.
Her first E.P ‘Shelf life’ was released on ‘C.A.N.V.A.S’ in 2018. She one half of father / daughter noise-improv berserkers Yeah You who released on Alter, Slip, Opal, Psychik Dancehall and Good Food. She also performs in collaborations such as ‘Bad@Maths’ who also released on Slip, ‘INSIN’ who released their first E.P ‘Sadsun’ on Hizz, and unreleased projects such as ‘Gailvn Keiln’, ‘OCDC’ and ‘0n est Malade’.
https://canvas-index.bandcamp.com/album/shelf-life
