Tracey Warr's Blog, page 18

November 14, 2019

Dartington Laser – Tracking Water

[image error]Tracey Warr, Constant Gardening. Photo: Yuri Tama.



The third in the Dartington Laser talks series – Art After The Collapse – takes place tomorrow, Friday 15 Nov, 7pm-9.15, free, at Dartington Studio 3. Pay bar in the Space Cafe from 6pm.





The series considers how artists are working on ‘deep adaptation’ to a climate and ecological collapse that some say has already started to happen. The central topic for 15 Nov is water.





Rob La Frenais will talk about his wild rowing art projects; Harriet Bell will speak on the River Dart Charter, a declaration of interdependence, which recognises the rights and needs of the river itself; Ingrid Pollard will discuss her  ‘tidealectic’ work The Boy Who Watches Ships Go By, made on the Lancashire coast; and I am talking on my research tracking the behaviour and properties of water and using that research to write future fiction.





More info and book here.





LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo’s international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. 

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Published on November 14, 2019 13:11

November 7, 2019

Dartington Laser Talks – Art After The Collapse 2

[image error]Shezad Dawood, Leviathan Cycle, Episode 4: Jamila (film still), 2018. HD Video, 10’36’’. Commissioned by Barakat Contemporary, Seoul; HE.RO, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and MUBI. Courtesy of the artist and UBIK Productions.



In tomorrow’s second session of the Dartington Laser talks series – Art After The Collapse – artists Shezad Dawood, Neal White, Vivek Vilasini, Ellie Harrison and Paul Chaney will be talking about visions of deep adaptation for societal and ecological change in their artworks. Art After The Collapse is curated and chaired by Rob La Frenais.





LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo Magazine‘s international programme of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. 





This series of talks have been commissioned by Dartington Learning as a prelude for the launch in September 2020 of a new Dartington Arts School and arts postgraduate courses: MA Poetics of Imagination and MA Arts and Place.* More information on the courses and Dartington Arts School is available from learning@dartington.org.





[*subject to validation]





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Published on November 07, 2019 01:16

November 3, 2019

The Anarchy – coming soon

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I’ve just submitted the manuscript for The Anarchy to my publishers. The book is the third in the trilogy on Nest ferch Rhys and the struggle between the Welsh and the Normans in the 12th century.





In this novel, Sheriff Haith tracks down those responsible for the sinking of The White Ship in the English Channel with 300 people onboard including King Henry’s heir; Nest deals with her forced marriage to Stephen de Marais; the runaway nun, Ida, seeks to evade exposure and punishment; and King Henry tackles rebellion in Normandy and the lack of a male heir.

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Published on November 03, 2019 10:45

October 24, 2019

Madrid Research

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Selected compilation of research process for Microhabitable project: Matadero Madrid – Artists Residency Centre; my studio in Matadero; Palacio de Cristal de Arganzuela; water drops in the tropical zone in Palacio de Cristal de Arganzuela; Jose Manuel Naredo biosphere cycle; Manzanares River; bookshelf; Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, exterior panels, Prado; Leticia Felgueroso, Botanical Gardens x 2; Willem van Aelst, Still Life with Fruit, 1664, Thyssen Bornemisza; Tomas Saraceno, webs, Thyssen Bornemisza; Inland CAR Microhabitable future fiction workshop.

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Published on October 24, 2019 07:18

Constant Gardening

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Last day of my residency at Matadero Madrid. I’ve been following my nose through a research process for the Microhabitable project, working towards writing future fiction. The Microhabitable project is a study programme co-organised by Matadero, Inland CAR and Serpentine Galleries General Ecology programme. It considers issues of scale – macro and micro – in relation to ecological and social change. There are three artists in residency, four guest speakers leading seminars and 10 participants. I participated in the ecological economics weekend with Jose Manuel Naredo and the organisational aesthetics seminar with Sven Luttiken. With the 10 participants I’m working on recording a future fiction scenario in which there is no more extraction (of fossil fuels, minerals etc.). The scenario will be part of a podcast. In my studio in Matadero (above), I’ve been collecting source materials: texts and images encountered during my month in Madrid to mix together like compost and produce a rich humus to sprout a future fiction story. The story engages with the vast temporal and spatial scale of water’s journey through 4 billion years, outer space, Earth’s atmosphere, bodies of water in the landscape, biological waters, underground waters, geysers and volcanos, and the biosphere cycle of life, decomposition and life. Provisionally titled Constant Gardening and set in the Palacio de Cristal de Arganzuela, a short version of the story will be published by Matadero in February and a longer version is coming soon, published with Inland CAR.

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Published on October 24, 2019 06:32

October 7, 2019

Writing on performance art workshop

[image error]Esther Ferrer



Gresol Art in Girona and La Bonne in Barcelona are collaborating to present a new performance and performance art workshop by Esther Ferrer as part of Intangible Environments. The performance is on 26 October 2019 at La Bonne. The workshop takes place 27-31 October 2019. I am contributing a session on writing about performance.  I last engaged with Gresol presenting a talk during the FEM 10 festival in 2010 and am delighted to be returning to present this workshop exploring how to develop writing as a way of documenting and investigating performance art in Girona on 31 October.





Esther Ferrer has been making performances since 1965 and is one of the pioneers of action art. She has worked as a solo artist and as a member of the ZAJ group (until 1996). Her work has been presented in major international art venues including Foundation Miro in Barcelona and Reina Sofia in Madrid. She represented Spain in the Venice Biennale in 1999. She examines the finite nature of life and the constant transformations of the body and has described her work as ‘rigorous absurdity’.





Me on writing on performance: Sitting on the floor, watching, a static recorder grounded, taking a line for a walk, doodling with words, flinging ink with gravity to the page. The artist describes in space, makes fleeting manifestation, articulates in air, holds forms in the flux, briefly carves and extricates expression. Thought embodied, enacted. What happened? What did I/we see? What did I/we experience? Words spin out defining, dedefining. The performer’s body rhythms and shudders. Mine, inhabited by its microfauna and flora twitches with empathy. Seeing becomes exploration. The weights of emotions and ideas are sensed. Voyeur, flaneur, botanising on the performance. And see my article ‘A Moving Meditation’ in Performance Research journal.

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Published on October 07, 2019 11:23

October 6, 2019

The Anarchy

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History offers so many fascinating true stories for a historical novelist to wind in with the fiction. I have just completed revisions to the manuscript of my final novel in the Conquest series on the life of the 12th century Welsh princess, Nest ferch Rhys. Some of the true bits in the new novel, The Anarchy, include a disused, Roman goldmine in Wales; the sinking of a ship carrying the king’s son and 300 other young nobles in the Channel; a Welsh warrior princess; and a pair of poisoned gloves. Publication date coming soon.

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Published on October 06, 2019 01:47

October 3, 2019

Big small things

[image error]Matadero Madrid



I have arrived in Madrid to work for a month in the art and ecology Microhabitable project, focused on issues of scale. My residency is hosted by Matadero Madrid who are co-organising Microhabitable with INLAND and the Serpentine Galleries





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I’m interested in entanglement and in the macrocosmic cycles of water and life and decomposition, which Jose Manuel Naredo addressed in his lecture on ecological economics this weekend. He also discussed cacotopia and eutopia.






I’m searching for something microcosmic to work with, through writing, to express these big notions and figuring out how to manifest macrocosmic cycles through a focus on the details of a small arena. ‘Things that seem small often turn out to be big’ (Anna Tsing).





My working method is like composting. I start with a mess or assemblage of images, texts, vague ideas, bits of my previous work; layer them up together, ideally in a studio-type approach where I can look at them on a wall, shift them around, juxtapose, talk about them with other people, create heat and friction amidst this source material, and see what emerges. 





Things going into the compost bin of my mind at present: artworks by Hieronymus Bosch, and memento mori still life paintings of decay; texts by Jim Crace, JG Ballard, Anna Tsing, Karen Barad, Mary Douglas, Manuel DeLanda, and Ed Yong; thinking about the human microbiome and the necrobiome; and stuff from the context I find myself walking around in. Matadero was Madrid’s slaughterhouse and livestock market on the edge of town until 1996. It has extraordinarily ornate and grandiose architecture for a slaughterhouse. Now, it’s no longer the edge of town, has been transformed into a cultural complex and the Manzanares river running beside it has also been recuperated. Matadero’s vast outdoor and indoor spaces are visual echoes of the beasts that once moved through here. It is a heat island in the city. Next door is the glasshouse greenhouse Palacio de Cristal de la Arganzuela with four microclimates, a former potato storage building popularly known as The Potato Ship. Stirring this lot around at the moment and taking it for walks.





Rather than reduce the mess to rational order, I’m looking for a way to make the mess expressive.

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Published on October 03, 2019 08:33

September 21, 2019

The Garden of Earthly Delights

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I am starting an artist’s residency next week at Matadero in Madrid as part of the Microhabitable project, co-organised with Serpentine Galleries and INLAND. I’m intending to explore entangled intra-relating and cohabitation through twitter fiction and a series of small publications. 





I will build on my previous published and installed texts – Meanda, The Water AgeInk Tourettes. I’m interested to further explore the cycle of life and decay which I addressed in The Midden (published by Garret). Another avenue of enquiry will be the macrocosmic water cycle – considering water’s extraterrestrial origins, its permeations of landscapes and living bodies and its journeys to and from the Earth’s core, which I started looking at in my installed text The Extraterrestrial in As Above So Below at Allenheads Contemporary Arts. I will be  focusing on slime technologies, the microflora and fauna of the human body, human interfaces with mycelium and algae. 





I’m interested to see where pondering that knot of ideas, alongside looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in The Prado and reading stories by J.G. Ballard and Octavio Paz, might take me.

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Published on September 21, 2019 07:02

September 11, 2019

Dartington LASER – Art After The Collapse

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A series of free talks (booking essential). Speakers include Farhana Yamin, Rupert Read, Dougald Hine, Shezad Dawood, Paul Chaney, Ingrid Pollard, Ellie Harrison, Vivek Vilasini and Alexandra Geldenhuys. https://www.dartington.org/event/dartington-laser-talks-art-after-the-collapse/

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Published on September 11, 2019 23:27