On Saturday June 9th – Sunday June 10th, occursus/plastiCities worked with Article magazine to produce a 24-hour magazine that will be launched at CADS (Smithfield, Sheffield S3 7AR) on Friday June 22nd, 8.15pm.
These are some of the lovely people we met during the 24 hours we spent working on the magazine.
Photos © Amanda Crawley Jackson 2012
No Fixed Abode is pleased to announce two events that will coincide with the current show at Son Gallery in Peckham, The Function of the Oblique; Action curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini.
AXIOMATIC PERCEPTIONS will position screenings of Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone’s works Neue Museen (2010) and Things to Come (2011), and Daniel Eisenberg’s film Displaced Person (1981) with guest speakers Daniel Eisenberg, Amanda Crawley Jackson, Gil Leung and Dan Smith.
The event aims to be an opportunity to reflect on how thinking through obliqueness requires us to look at the multiple dimensions of its conception – exactly what the oblique may represent as a tool to appropriate space and create instability, one that forces the body to adapt to disequilibrium and vertigo, raises the possibility of an oblique subject. Interestingly a notion of resistance seems to be of key importance to how a philosophical justification for the oblique may operate. Starting wide of the context of the oblique, the event will aim to position a discourse of horizontality, groundlessness and contingency – both physical and perceptive – to look towards an active, embodied philosophical space.
Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone are practising artists who have collaborated since 1993 and exhibit internationally. Graham Ellard is a Reader at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design; Stephen Johnstone is a Reader at Goldsmiths College, University of London. They both live in London.
Daniel Eisenberg has been making films and videos since 1976. His films have been screened throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. He lives and works in Chicago and is a Professor in the departments of Film/Video/New Media/Animation, and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson lectures in the French Department at the University of Sheffield, where she specialises in the treatment of space in contemporary literature and visual arts from France and the French-speaking world.
Gil Leung is a writer, artist and curator based in London. She is Distribution Manager at LUX and editor of Versuch journal. She writes for Afterall and other independent publications.
Dr Dan Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design. His interests are in history, the future and the disruption of the illusion of an ongoing present. His book Traces of Modernity, is published in June.
We would like to thank Attilia Fattori Franchini, Guy Robertson and Tom Saunderson at Son Gallery, and LUX for their support with this event.
No Fixed Abode
For more information, please visit http://www.songallery.co.uk/
The next Reading Loop will take place on Wednesday February 22nd, 7pm, in studio 49 at Bloc.
The session will be led by Angelina Ayers and Amanda Crawley Jackson.
The texts are:
Karl Palmas, ‘ “Deleuze and DeLanda: A new ontology, a new political economy?” ‘
and a series of sections from Iain Sinclair’s book, Ghost Milk:
Fence Wars, Raids, Funny Money, Against the Grain, Along the Thames from the London Stone, In the Belly of the Architect (particularly section on Superstructure)
Please feel free to dip in and out of these sections and to read only as many as you have time to read!
You might also be interested to listen to this audio piece, in which Iain Sinclair talks about the ways in which the Olympics have affected development in London.
There’s also a longer podcast here, a recording of Iain Sinclair’s talk at the If Conference in 2011.
There’s a special (and free) edition of Antennae, issue 8, vol. 2 (Winter 2008), entitled Pretty Ugly which
predominantly addresses the concept of ‘Pretty Ugly’ as a matter of proximity and distance between us and animals combined with a focus on the overpowering physicality that animals posses: too distant to be understood, within reach of our mouths, or far too close for comfort.
This issue of Antennae opens with a relatively light and ‘not so disturbing’ piece by artist and curator Silvia B, whose obsession for objects made of animals brings her to question the difference between humans and animals; wondering if it only is a thin layer of civilization that may account for the conviction – shared by most people – that we can turn all species into knickknacks, except our own.
Please note that this edition of Antennae contains explicit imagery.
occursus is delighted to announce that one of the contributors to this volume – Rob McKay (University of Sheffield) – will be taking part in the Upperthorpe project, looking specifically at urban fauna and the relationships we share with animals.
Wardsend was opened in the early 1850s, when a nearby churchyard became full. The name Wardsend is a corruption of “Worldsend”, which is reputed to be the site of the second coming of Christ, and is listed in a land agreement in 1161.
The site of the cemetery (see map opposite) occupies 5.5 acres and once included a small chapel, office and a sexton’s house. The railway line runs through the cemetery, dividing it into a western half which is wooded and an eastern half which is open (see pictures).
The first burial was in 1857 and was of Mary Ann Marsden aged 2 years. By tradition the first body was always given the title of “Guardian of the Cemetery”. By 1900 the number of burials totalled 20,000 and the site was extended.
George Lambert VC (16 December 1819 – 10 February 1860), born C0unty Armagh, was a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for valour in the face of the enemy.
A Sergeant-Major in the 84th Regiment of Foot (later the 2nd Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment), he died in Sheffield on February 10, 1860.
84th Regiment. Sergeant-Major George LambertDate of Acts of Bravery, 29th July, 16th August, and 25th September, 1857For distinguished conduct, at Onao, on the 29th of July; at Bithoor, on the 16th of August; and at Lucknow, on the 25th of September.(Extract from Field Force Orders of the late Major-Gcneral Havelock, dated 17th October, 1857.)
There used to be a chapel and a sexton’s cottage at Wardsend Cemetery. The cottage was burned down by rioters on 3rd June 1862 when a crowd tried to get hold of a gravedigger suspected of selling bodies for dissection. The gravedigger was later sentenced to 3 months – not for selling bodies but for selling the same graves over and over.
Martin Elms
Nothing is more unfitting for an intellectual resolved on practising what was earlier called philosophy, than to wish, in discussion, and one might almost say in argumentation, to be right. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of that spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down. […] Such naivety is at work wherever philosophy has even a distant resemblance to the gestures of persuasion. These are founded on the presupposition of a universitas literarum, an a priori agreement between minds able to communicate with each other, and thus on complete conformism. When philosophers, who are well known to have difficulty in keeping silent, engage in conversation, they should always try to lose the argument, but in such a way as to convict their opponent of untruth.
(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)
The Voyagers, by Penny Lane
Politics is litigious. It is a deviation from the normal order of things. It is a denaturalising gesture, a rupture and an interruption. (See Jacques Rancière, Dissensus)
Politics is dissensus.
Consensus is the loss of thought. It is politics understood as the affair of government.
The futility of noisy protests that everyone agrees with…? (That leads to more consensus.)
Art as a means of disclosing the ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’ as contingent? (See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 16). The denaturalising function of art.
What constitutes consensus and dissent today? In what forms are they practised? What kinds of sociality do they entail?
Doing is a torrent against all enclosure. Our power to do things differently, our power to create a different world, is a flow that exerts a growing force against the walls that hem us in, a constant breaching of these walls. Capital runs around mending these breaches (granting land reforms, redefining the norms of sexuality, for example), but the flow of our power will not be contained, simply because our collective life depends on it. (John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p. 261)
What are the links between art and politics? Is art (and can it be) political? Does it do?
What is the place of the university? Is the university a consenting or dissenting institution?
dissent (vb): early 15c., from L. dissentire “differ in sentiments, disagree, be at odds, contradict, quarrel,” from dis- “differently” (see dis-) + sentire “to feel, think” (seesense). Related: Dissented; dissenting.
dissension (n): early 14c., from O.Fr. dissension (12c.) and directly from L. dissensionem (nom. dissensio) “disagreement, difference of opinion, discord, strife,” noun of action from pp. stem of dissentire “disagree”
consensus (n): 1854 as a term in physiology; 1861 of persons; from L. consensus “agreement, accord,” pp. of consentire (see consent). There is an isolated instance of the word from 1633.
For more information on this section, contact Amanda Crawley Jackson (amandacrawleyjackson@gmail.com)
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