A Continual Cry (2021)

A Continual Cry is an archive, or an automated oracular process of reflection that continually offers new meaning from existing content through proximity and shifting relation.

Something like a dream, the programme uproots works from their original chronology and context to allow alternative narratives to unfold. This, set against the continual counting of colonial time, the clock, marking each minute, creates a tension between prison and medium. Whilst describing and archiving the moment the present slips into the past.

I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless)

Performance, 23 Jun, 17:00 – 18:00 in collaboration with Gessnerallee

A work made in a moment when all that was there was this body, its dreams and nightmares and cycles and needs, sensations and wanting. I went mining. I haunt this work. I is a collection of already historical circumstances, remembered and un-remembered. I is a crowd. I is a trick of the light.

A durational performance inducing a state of expansiveness and detachment from the pressure to create – or be formed by – meaning through conventional narrative arcs. Its duration witnesses / tracks the rhythmic cycles, the peaks and troughs of an endocrine system beyond the arc of climax.

The work situates a research and obsession with the unit of ‘one minute’ – asking whether we can transform the stuff of time or whether it transforms us. Considering the invention of colonial time and agency, the ways we inhabit its units of fixed endless measurement, even as this Time slips out of relation to the celestial bodies that have long been its anchor and justification.

Working with live and recorded text written over the last year from dreams and heartache and reflection – a wasteland of feeling – I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) is a wide and flat landscape as score for performance. A reading, a listening, a movement.

Credits:

Concept, text, performance SERAFINE1369

Sound Design Josh Anio Grigg

Originally commissioned by Liverpool Biennial 2021

Previously performed at the Bluecoat for Liverpool Biennial (June 2021), Radialsystem for Montag Modus, Berlin (August 2021), ARS22, Kiasma, Helsinki (June 2022), IMMATERIAL, Mexico City (February 2023).

SERAFINE1369 is a London born and based artist, dancer and body-focused researcher working with dancing as a philosophical undertaking, a political project with ethical psycho-spiritual ramifications for being-in-the-world; dancing as intimate technology. They work with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence.

Their practice is relational, cumulative and often collaborative and they work in various constellations, at different scales and in different roles to build spaces for communing/attuning/communicating. Spaces that might hold the complex, multiple and contradictory; spaces that consider movement and transformation as inevitable.

Their work prioritises listening and is responsive to the specificities of context, using movement as a tool for flattening hierarchies of perception between visible and invisible (felt/sensed/remembered) presences.