Something Other: On Visions – Listening Event

 

This listening event is available for one week, from 23 – 30 July 2021, here and on the Ignota Soundcloud.

Something Other is a website, a series of events, and a collaboration between Mary Paterson, Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin. Something Other invites other artists and writers to collaborate with them through a series of themed chapters, making space for experimentation and rethinking the relationships between writing and performance.

In advance of the tenth chapter, On Visions, Something Other and Ignota are collaborating on a listening event, gathering together audio versions of the contributed texts alongside other somethings. 

Visioning requires constellations and liberating our imagination; it invites politics of hope, and a trust in the power of fictioning or collective world-making, from the occult to the speculative. Visioning makes possible the movement from what is to what if, the world now to the world not-yet. In On Visions, we ask: what do you envision? What do you connect across time? What can you see about the future? And the past? How does your vision change your world, and which world are you talking about?  

With contributions from so mayer, J R Carpenter, Caridad Svich, Karen Christopher, Sabrina Fuller, Ali Baybutt, A. Lyre, Alisa Oleva, Marianne Habeshaw, Mary Paterson, Maddy Costa and Diana Damian Martin.

 

Part 1

1. Introduction
2. Karen Christopher: My body finds the signal
   This piece stumbles around in a form-following-function description of the robustness afforded by alignment and difference (or the combination of disparate elements), pinging from the acceptance of that which we don’t prefer to the vision of human bodies as antennae receiving transmissions
3. Diana Damian Martin: reluare
   reluare is a 365-day writing project still in motion on migrancy, memory, grief, translocality and queer speculation. This reading presents the first ten hand-written cards. The project is still unfolding and you can read more here.
4. Marianne Habeshaw: The Event
   The event is an extract from Blather Gaps, a collection of poems that convey rich, voluptuous storytelling. It finds the comedy of miscommunication and social tension in the context of austerity, gentrification and political division. 
5. So Mayer: Zeus
   ‘Zeus’ is a true story, which I just misspelled as stroy. It’s a story about needing a stroy, needing to destroy the stories that seek to destroy us, an outcry about crying out in the middle of the night. It’s for girls (original meaning: child of any gender) who realised they didn’t believe in god because god didn’t believe in them, and kept surviving anyway.

Part 2

1. Introduction
2. Alexandra Baybutt: Blinking to Hold
   ‘Blinking to Hold’ shifts perspectives on the physicality of seeing, and is concerned with touch, attempt and failure. The text is read by Nicholas Coddington.
3. Sabrina Fuller: Coloured Glass and Mirrors
   An entanglement of visions.
   
4. Mary Paterson: The Future Is a Pack of Lies
   ‘The Future Is a Pack of Lies’ is a prophecy.
5. Caridad Svich: aPeeling
   Across glitches of time, a traveler recalls a lover who may also be a country. Both stand on the precarious stage of late capitalism. This is a time to peel back layers of memory, try not to be crushed under the weight of imposed austerity, and make space for a different kind of dreaming. 
   
   

Part 3

1. Introduction
2. J. R. Carpenter: An Account of a New Comet
   ‘An Account of a New Comet’ is based on a letter written by Caroline Hershel to the Royal Society on 2 August 1786. Hershel discovered eight comets in all. The observational journals she kept over a thirty-year period provide one of the earliest records of how science actually gets done.
3. Maddy Costa: photographs as yet untaken of people who don’t exist
   For all the visions that arrive unbidden, take up lodging, linger.
4. A. Lyre: Voidsong
   I was living alone. There was nowhere to go and no one to talk to. I saw portents, made divinations, left my body, never quite returned. The songs come out of that winter. There are two themes: labour and desire. What else is there? Nothing, that’s what. Two extracts: #001 “Hewn”; #002 “All what can”. Composed October-December 2020; sung, recorded June 2021.
5. Alisa Oleva: A walk to the edge
   This audio walk is a walk to the edge. Edge of your city/town/village/memories/visions. I remember walking in the center of London and overhearing a tired kid asking his parents: Where does this city end? Does it end when you stop walking? Does it end when you are home? Does it end when you reach the ring-road? 
   You can listen to it as you set off on your own walk to the edge. Or as you stay at home or go to bed and imagine that walk to the edge you will later undertake. [Music used: Eliane Radigue: Adnos]

Contributors 

Alexandra Baybutt (CMA, RSME, PhD) works freelance as an artist, educator and researcher. Her writing appears in different places, including the Journal of the Anthropology of Work’s ‘Exertions’ series on essential labour; Global Performance Studies on dramaturgy (forthcoming); and Creative Arts Education and Therapy (CAET) journal on teaching and learning the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System in multiple languages.

J. R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and researcher working across performance, print, and digital media. Her web-based work The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Her collection An Ocean of Static was highly commended by the Forward Prizes 2018. Her collection This is a Picture of Wind was named one of The Guardian’s best poetry books of 2020.

Karen Christopher is a collaborative performance maker, performer, and teacher. Her company, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, is devoted to collaborative processes, listening for the unnoticed, the almost invisible, and the very quiet, paying attention as an act of social cooperation. She was a member of Goat Island performance group for 20 years. Forthcoming: Always Already, an 8-hour performative installation with an embedded performance in the penultimate hour and, co-edited with Mary Paterson, Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets is a book of essays focused on the form and practice of the work of pairs in 14 different ways by 14 different people.

Maddy Costa is a writer and dramaturg, and a co-host of Something Other.

Sabrina Fuller is interested in how groups and individuals respond and react to society’s expectations: how objectification and exclusion from mainstream society can give license to chart other ways of being: how a classification as Other allows a freedom to develop a language of difference and form unlikely alliances, and how we construct and express our subjectivities. She uses a range of tools and media including still and moving image, voice, sound and the written word.

Marianne Habeshaw is an emerging contemporary poet and Teaching Assistant from East London. Marianne likes to play with the concept of learnt social behaviours. She does this with an intimate, humorous voice.

Diana Damian Martin is an artist, researcher and co-host of Something Other.

So Mayer is a writer, bookseller and organiser. Their most recent book is A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020), and their work has appeared in On Relationships (3ofCups, 2020), At the Pond (Daunt, 2019) and Spells (Ignota Books, 2018), among others. They work with Burley Fisher Books, queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes, and campaigners Raising Films.

Now based in London, Alisa Oleva was born in Moscow in 1989. She treats the city as her studio and urban life as material, to consider issues of urban choreography and urban archeology, traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Her projects have manifested as a series of interactive situations, performances, movements scores, personal and intimate encounters, parkour, walkshops, and audio walks.

Caridad Svich is a text-builder and theatre-maker. Her plays include 12 Ophelias, Red Bike, The Book of Magdalene and Theatre: a love story. Among her awards are an OBIE for Lifetime Achievement. She is Editor at Contemporary Theatre Review (Taylor & Francis), and on the advisory board for Global Performance Studies. She is published by Intellect Books, Seagull Books, Methuen Drama, and more. Her film (as co-screenwriter, based on her play) Fugitive Dreams has been seen at the Manchester Film Festival, Tallinn Black Nights Festival, Austin Film Festival and Fantasia Film Festival. Her second film (as sole screenwriter) is currently in post-production.