Camden Art Audio

How can discourses between seemingly disparate disciplines inspire art? Tenant of Culture and historian Arwen P. Mohun reflect on the importance of research in their respective practices and discuss the influence of Mohun's book Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 on the exhibit Soft Acid.  

Episode 2 focuses on past, present and future of the Detroit-Berlin axis. By means of an interview collage, writer and Make Techno Black Again activist DeForrest Brown, Jr., Lerato Khathi aka Lakuti (founder of Uzuri Recordings and the Bring Down the Walls initiative), Boris Dolinski (resident DJ at Berghain) and Mark Ernestus (musician and founder of the Hard Wax record store) explore how the rapid growth of techno and club culture in Germany after 1989 relates to the music's origins in the Black neighbourhoods of the post-industrialised city of Detroit.

This podcast is led by DeForrest Brown Jr, author of Assembling a Black Counter Culture, in conversation with Steve Goodman (aka Kode9 and founder of Hyperdub) and Nkisi (co-founder of NON Worldwide). Collectively they discuss the migration of techno music from North America to Europe with an initial focus on the situated contexts of the dance music scene in London and across the U.K. during the early 1990s. With reference to techno's spiritual and technological origins, evolution, and relationship with the Hardcore Continuum movement. Techno at the End of the Future – Episode 1: London was produced by Zakia Sewell.

For this episode of Conversations, Dave Beech and Esther Leslie navigate Olga Balema's installation Computer to examine a range of formal, material and theoretical concerns. With a focus on the geographies of production, digital processes, architectural grids, artistic labour, and how domestic spaces have also functioned as workplaces since the onset of the pandemic. In doing so, they reflect on Walter Benjamin's writing on the reception, engagement and interaction of the horizontal plane in art, design and media, whilst interweaving historical narratives regarding Goethe's fascination with the Ginkgo plant. Dave Beech is an artist and writer. He is a Reader in Art and Marxism at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art (Brill 2020), Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production(Pluto 2019) and Art and Value: Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill 2015), which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Beech is an artist who worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His solo art practice revisits the critical traditions of photomontage, documentary photography, digital print, the photo archive and the photobook. Esther Leslie is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her books include Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde; Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry; Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage; Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form, and the milk projects, Deeper in the Pyramid and The Inextinguishable (both with Melanie Jackson). Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

On March 20th, 1980, Mount St. Helens (traditionally known as Lawetlat'la or Loowit) erupted. Rocks boiled, rivers evaporated into clouds, and Spirit Lake—a site connected with Indigenous whistling spirits known as Tsiatko—was smothered under a blanket of pyrolized trees. As part of a continuing series of works under the “Echomaking” umbrella, in this audio essay, Kristen Gallerneaux (Métis-Wendat) uncovers the sonic, material, and poetic resonances connected to this story. She will focus on the contagion effect of folklore born out of cataclysmic events, new mineral formats, and recovering knowledge within charged landscapes affected by geological and ecological transformation. This recording was made on land occupying the ancestral, traditional and contemporary homelands of the Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox), Peoria, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), and Myaamia people.  The people of these nations were forced from their land through the 1807 Treaty of Detroit. Kristen Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University). She is also the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. In 2018, she was a Future Thought speaker at Moogfest and premiered the experimental short film, The Hum. She has presented at Unsound editions Dislocation (2014), Presence (2018), and Intermission (2020). In 2017, she spoke about the history of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer and taught an electronic music production workshop at Pop Kultur Berlin. She has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, the Quietus, and Herman Miller's WHY magazine. She has published on wide-ranging topics like mathematics in mid-century design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world's first mousepad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her book, High Static, Dead Lines, is available via Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press in the United States. Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.

Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and curator Sophie J Williamson, consider how time, history and circadian rhythms imprint themselves on our bodies. In Being Taken for Granite, Ursula K. Le Guin described a kinship with mud as a body that yields, reacts, imprints and responds. Taking this text as a guide they will unravel relationships between the body and the soil from which it is born, considering ways of archeologically excavating and reading bodies – human, non-human and geological – to understand their ever-present dialogue with the past. From the sedimentary strata of mountains to the narratives secreted in our own gestures, Okpokwasili and Williamson discuss the body as an accumulation and amalgamation of historic interactions. They will consider how lineage, past lives and trauma secret themselves in bodies, and how these silences resurface to reveal our entangled pasts, form us in the contemporary and redirect futures. Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer and writer. Her performance work has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, the 10th Annual Berlin Biennale, and Jacob's Pillow, among other institutions. Her work includes two Bessie Award–winning productions: Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance and Bronx Gothic. She has held residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Rauschenberg Foundation Captiva Residency, and New York Live Arts, where she was a Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. Okpokwasili is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. Sophie J Williamson is the initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a multidisciplinary research platform focused on the intimacies of being with the geological. Williamson was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre (2013 – 21), prior to which she was part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009–13) and worked at the Singapore Biennale (2006), Venice Biennale (2007) and Manchester Asian Triennale (2008). Her writing has appeared in frieze, Art Monthly, Elephant and Aesthetica, among others. Residencies and awards include: V-A-C Research Prize Recipient (2020), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Curatorial Fellow (2020); and Gasworks Curatorial Fellow (2016). Her anthology, Translation, part of the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press – Documents of Contemporary Art series, brings together writings by artists, poets, authors and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil. Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.

Professor Louise Steel examines the history of clay and how the cultural and technological knowledges of the earliest settled farming and urban communities were informed by people's engagements with clay.       As one of the first mineral substance to be transformed from a malleable to a durable state. Many societies perceive it as an animate substance permeated with "a spiritual energy and life-force" that retains a "thing-power", allowing it to be shaped into various forms.[1] [2]     Building on her ongoing research Steel looks at the agency of matter to illustrate how the distinct capacities of clay (in relationship with water and fire) shaped and facilitated, but equally constrained, people's behaviour, resulting in distinctive social and material worlds. Focusing on the vitality of matter, Steel considers how “the materials themselves are determining—even actively responsible—for the final shape and manner by which the finished article can manifest”. [3]   [1] Boivin, N. 2012. From veneration to exploitation: Human engagement with the mineral world. In Soils, Stones and Symbols: Cultural Perceptions of the Mineral World; Boivin, N., Owoc, M.A., (Eds). London: Routledge, pp. 1–29.  [2] Bennett, J. 2010.Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  [3] Attala, L. and Steel, L. 2019.Body Matters: Exploring the Materiality of the Human Body> Cardiff: Wales University Press.  Louise Steel is Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Her research focuses on materiality and the interaction of objects in people's social worlds. She is series editor of Materialities in Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Wales Press, and is currently editing a volume on Earthy Matters: Exploring Human Interactions with Earth, Soil and Clay.

John Merrick and Alina Kolar discuss the history of The Radical Thinkers series from Verso. To reflect on how it enabled them to discover and engage with the ideas presented by favoured radical thinkers and the challenges of publishing at large. John Merrick is a writer based in London, where he is an editor at Verso Books. He has had work published in New Left Review, Boston Review, TLS, Jacobin, Tribune, New Statesman, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about class, culture and the North of England.

The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Maya Goodfellow and Alina Kolar speak about the understanding of the word Radical in relation to Immigration and Borders, Affect and Effect of Time, with regards to the ongoing impact of the pandemic, and what is within and beyond our control. Maya Goodfellow is a writer, researcher and academic. She has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera and the Independent. She received her PhD from SOAS, University of London and is a trustee of the Runnymede Trust. She is the author of Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats, out now in paperback with Verso.

The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Aaron Bastani and Alina Kolar try to determine The New Radical between the news, fact and fiction. They examine voices that make up the realm of thinking and unthinking the mainstream and the grass-roots. Aaron Bastani is co-founder and Senior Editor at Novara Media and has a doctorate from the University of London. His research interests include new media, social movements and political economy. He has written for Vice, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New York Times and regularly appears as a commentator on the BBC and Sky News. He is the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, out now in paperback with Verso.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the value and importance of outdoor spaces. Recent studies into public health and well-being state that green environments are associated with reduced levels of depression, anxiety, and fatigue and can enhance both children and adults’ quality of life. However, access is not always a given, nor is everyone encouraged to feel welcome in green spaces. Flock Together is a birdwatching collective for people of colour initiated to challenge and dismantle existing prejudices. Over the past year, every month, they have been organising walks around London’s green spaces. To promote the mental health benefits of birdwatching — and expand the perception of what it means to be a birder. Since its inception, Flock Together has attracted hundreds of young people, who have either physically attended or joined their expanding online community. Recently branches have opened in NYC and Toronto, with more to follow. For this episode of Public Knowledge, Flock Together co-founder Nadeem Perera walks us through Hackney Marshes in East London. To explain what interested him in birdwatching, how he and Ollie Olanipekun came together to form the collective – and why birds can teach us all a thing or two.

Artist Tamara Henderson in conversation with Gina Buenfeld (Camden Art Centre Exhibitions Curator) co-curator of The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree. They discuss the concerns that run throughout Henderson's work including hypnosis, altered states, life processes, seasonal patterns and vegetal motifs. Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

Michael Marder, author of numerous books on plant philosophy, will be in-conversation with Camden Art Centre Director, Martin Clark, to discuss the significance of plants for our lives, ways of thinking, and relationships between human and non-human beings. Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology. Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. The final episode of this podcast series is a conversation between two friends: Ariana Reines and Sophie Robinson, poets and educators who look to spaces of hospitality for connection and kinship. Sharing their poetry and the experiences that shaped its writing, the pair discuss possibilities for care despite institutional cruelty, getting sober as an act of radical love, and how the Sun and Moon communicate very different and sometimes uncomfortable truths to Reines and Robinson respectively. What’s Love Got To Do With It? is programmed and curated by Beatrice Gibson, produced by Alannah Chance, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It is a commission by Bergen Kunsthall; Camden Art Centre, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. In the second episode, poets Alice Notley and Precious Okoyomon converse together for the first time to discuss how they tune into interconnectedness, why dreaming together might forge collective states of belonging, and ask each other how love moves them and the world. Sharing their poetry and its rootedness in their personal histories – as well as their hopes for the future – Notley and Okoyomon render visions of intergenerational lives in continuous acts of translation. What’s Love Got To Do With It? is programmed and curated by Beatrice Gibson, produced by Alannah Chance, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It is a commission by Bergen Kunsthall; Camden Art Centre, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto.

What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. In this first episode, CAConrad and LeAnne Howe share an intensely personal conversation with one another about First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who insisted she was tormented by an Indigenous Spirit – a reminder that her husband’s record on racial equality is fraught with violence and oppression; AIDS and loving during the Reagan years; and the new horizons created by the Black Lives Matter movement. Please note: this episode contains sensitive content from the start. What’s Love Got To Do With It? is programmed and curated by Beatrice Gibson, produced by Alannah Chance, and features unique compositions by Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It is a commission by Bergen Kunsthall; Camden Art Centre, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto.

‘Stop Making Sense : Part 1 – Portals to understanding’ is a two-part online series, curated by Camden Art Centre’s Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellow, Phoebe Collings-James. The work looks to unravel what it means to facilitate and hold spaces of knowledge sharing. In Part 1, Collings-James invites Serafine1369 and Daniella Valz Gen to consider how their practices of tarot, divination and performance can embody queer thinking around teaching in spaces outside of institutional structures. Rooted in spirituality, the artists consider how, through these shared practices and spaces, one can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and find relief from alienation. Produced by Sandra Pierre White with music by Kelman Duran.

For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London.

Queer Nature explores the little-known, often-overlooked and rare intimate behaviour of the botanical world. Investigating the relationships between ecological thought and queer theory to celebrate the multitude of shapes, gender, sexes and colours that exist around us. Landscape architect Céline Baumann describes the journey that led her to discover and examine diversity within the plant kingdom.

Dr Stephan Harding explains how Gaia Alchemy integrates the sciences of the Earth with alchemical approaches to psyche so we can live harmoniously within the limits of our planet. Although the development of science has given us many benefits, its predominance has made us into detached observers fundamentally disconnected from each other and from nature.  And yet, in our own time, science has given us detailed knowledge about the evolution of our Earth – Gaia - whilst depth psychology in the guise of alchemy provides us with profound insights about the workings of the human psyche.  Dr Harding holds a doctorate in ecology from the University of Oxford and is the Resident Ecologist and Deep Ecology Research Fellow at Schumacher College, where he co-founded (with Professor Brian Goodwin) and co-ordinated the MSc in Holistic Science for the last two decades. He is author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, his first book. His forthcoming book is called Gaia Alchemy.

Musician Sarah Angliss (London, UK) draws on the botanical writing of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century Christian mystic, to help make sense of her own experiences of illness, healing and the turn of the season while the city is in lockdown. Sarah immerses us in a sonic fever dream, using fragments of Hildegard’s texts on herbal medicine to explore her personal experiences of fever as she examines Hildegard’s ecstatic visions.

The Amazon Rainforest is the world's most abundant pharmacopeia - filled with countless plants that are used traditionally to heal physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. The traditional healers who live here say that they receive their knowledge as transmissions from the plants themselves during periods of solitary retreat in the jungle.  In this podcast, Gina Buenfeld - Co-Curator of The Botanical Mind - describes some of her experiences in the Amazon rainforest alongside recordings of Justina - a Maestra (healer) from the Shipibo-Conibo people, an ethnic group living along the Ucayali River in the Amazonian rainforest in Peru - to provide a rare insight into physical and spiritual relationships with sacred plants. For the last three years, Gina Buenfeld (Curator, Camden Art Centre), been researching traditional plant healing in Europe, Central and South America. In particular, she has spent time in the Colombian, Peruvian and Brazilian areas of the Amazon Rainforest learning about the plant-knowledge and healing practices of indigenous, and mestizo, communities.

Leading scientist of plant cognition, Monica Gagliano (Australia), presents a new understanding of the vegetal world. She argues that, in order to understand plant sentience we need to radically rethink our definitions of intelligence and consciousness to move away from a human-centric model. Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight, smell and touch to communication, the podcast will challenge our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than most imagine.