The first event of Overlap will also be the launch event for AND Festival. The weirder, harder, more-mysytical brother to Wave If You're Really There - Spectres of Spectacle features new work from Wirral-based music-maestro Forest Swords and tons more!
SPECTERS OF SPECTACLE
***hauntology in Performance/Lo-Fi/Writing/Ultra-Boogie***
feat. Maria Minerva, Anat Ben David, Forest Swords, Victoria Gray, Emily Critchley, Samizdat
at Static Gallery, for AND Festivalopening party
9pm-1am, Thursday 29th September
"Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Altogether other. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology." Derrida
Produced by Mercy and AND, with programming support from Samizdat and La Racaille, this event features a new auto-destructive work from musical pioneer Forest Swords, cut at Ted Riederer's amazing Never Records installation at London Bridge; a one-off performance from the incomparable Anat Ben David (Chicks on Speed); art-house boogie from Maria Minerva, and a unique mix of avant garde performance and new writing works from Victoria Gray, Nathan Walker and Emily Critchley.
"has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of 'reality' has ever felt more pressing? Excessive presence leaves no traces. Hauntology's absent present, meanwhile, is nothing but traces...." K-punk
This unique gig/performance/installation hybrid event brings together artists and musicians working with the contemporary practices which reinvent retro-impulses and personal histories into an uncanny hyper-modern response. These half-erased, deliberately fogged works across lo-fi, spoken word, and the analogue/digital crossover deliver a nuanced, complex response to a present day of degraded ideals.
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As a part of the Mercy Overlap programme this event visits the '-ology' as a unifying and creative tool. We reappropriate 'hauntology' from its use by musicologist Simon Reynolds to describe dubstep and its cousins in music - and see how it manifests itself in the best avant garde practice across poetry, performance and music.
In this way we look to explore and interogate the critical strands that hold these aparently disperate practices together, as practice becomes text, and text returns to practice as a ghost of itself, in the new context of a shifting culture.
We were inspired to curate this show, by AND Festival's 2011 theme of Belief, and the idea of living in a post-belief society.
SPECTERS OF SPECTACLE
free
at Static Gallery, for AND Festivalopening party
9pm-1am, Thursday 29th September