Fiona MacDonald: Director, Writer, Editor

Esi Eshun: Performer, Editorial Direction

“Feral Practice & Esi Eshun's Lissener is a darkly comic audio work responding to the ruined Oare Gunpowder Works, Oare Creek and Oare Marshes. Oare’s explosive past intertwines with diverse natural histories in this watery world, disturbing the expected hierarchies between species and states of being. The creaturely cast of characters includes Noctule bats, wading birds, a Bamboo Worm and a Southern Hawker dragonfly.

Words and stories are inserted into broader rhythms. If the concept ‘soundscape’ prioritizes the sounds that mammals hear, the term ‘vibroscape’ suggests an expanded world, in which we are just one kind of being with a pair of ears, in a world of differently-eared and non-eared, sensitive and vibratory, sensing and speaking beings. Alongside narrative, the artists use alternative field recording technologies such as hydrophones and contact microphones to access nonhuman kinds of vibrational experience. 

Vibrant material meetings and exchanges occur at every level of our bodies and worlds but often go unregarded, or unknown. If we sensitize ourselves (as vegetal philosopher Michael Marder advises) to the fuzzy edges of our subjectivity in order to meet beings very different to ourselves, might it be in the ‘wilds’ of the imagination that we can better re-align with nonhuman nature?”

Short extract from Bad Ideas #1

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X8_TkMsdDrnSiHY_-VW2Cn40J46OMvRc/view?usp=drivesdk

From Saturday, 12 November, exhibition Bad Ideas by Bad Ideas Collective will be open at Tallinn City Gallery. While searching for an answer to the questions what distinguishes a brilliant idea from a poor one and how big a role do different contexts play in contemporary art, the collective presents 17 short videos by individual artists and collaborators without direct authorial attribution.

The artworks of Bad Ideas are presented without direct authorial attribution, as a means of shifting audience engagement away from questions of production and ownership. The emphasis is on the candid disclosure of the play and processing of ideas – how they are evaluated and either used or abandoned in the creative process. Within this quasi-confessional framework a kind of collective formal freedom might emerge: a speculative post art-world space where the ghosts of discarded possibilities drift and intermingle, cut loose from the moorings of authorship and value. Do these artworks in fact exist in a parallel reality – a “bad” world where the ideas came to fruition through alternative thought processes? 

Connecting UK museum collection items with home and diasporic communities through virtual visits and art practices. A conversation about Prisoners of Love, Concepts Have Teeth and Mootookakio'ssin research projects, with work and thoughts from students who have been part of the projects. Art practices embedded in a web of relations between de/colonial histories, technologies and digital media.”

Event at Vestibule Gallery: Disruptions: power dynamics of aquisition

Anjalie Dalal Clayton, Sara David, Esi Eshun, Lennon Mhishi, Louisa Minkin, Raksha Patel, Judy Willcocks, Siyan Zhang 

This conversation will explore the power dynamics of acquisition in museums and galleries. From researching existing collections, to surface bias, to working with acquisition selection panels, commissioning new work and working for restitution and reparation. What is a collection? What does it mean to have your work accessioned? We will reflect on the power dynamics of selecting student work for the UAL collection and how they have been overturned, as well as situating this work of disruption within its broader, urgent and ongoing political context.

https://www.thedailystar.net/in-focus/news/dhaka-art-summit-2020-seismic-movements-1865827?amp

"Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming", curated by the Otolith Group, features works by Ayo Akingbade, Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Tony Cokes, Esi Eshun, Black Quantum Futurism, Mohammed Harb, Louis Henderson, Onyeka Igwe, Salman Nawati, Ana Pi, Morgan Quaintance, Alfred Santana, Rania Stephan, Sharif Waked and Rehana Zaman”

https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/941633461/847c29c975

Commissioned by RIBA, The Royal Institute of British Architects, Esi Eshun's The Vanishment responds to an invitation, in the organisation’s 90th year, to reconsider the imperialist architectures of its London headquarters. Focusing on a monumental canvas, The Henry Jarvis Mural, created to adorn a movable, so called vanishing wall, the film sets out to draw attention to some of the darker narratives intertwined within its making. Choreographing photographic archives with a meditative voiceover, it aims to provide an insight into the work’s place within wider sociopolitical and ecological currents, both in its day, and by extension, in the present moment.

https://www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/exhibitions/Raise-the-Roof

Our latest exhibition explores the narratives and attitudes embedded within the fabric of RIBA’s headquarters at 66 Portland Place, London, unpacking themes such as gender, race and imperialism through a series of new and exciting creative works.

Opened in 1934, when the modern architectural profession was being forged, RIBA’s Grade II* listed home can tell us a lot about the values and beliefs of architects in that period, and of wider society. 

In this exhibition, a variety of new artistic interventions interrogate and respond to the complex narratives within specific interior features of 66 Portland Place – the Jarvis Mural and Florence Hall Dominion Screen. You’re invited to help uncover the building’s complicated history and share your hopes for the future of architecture and the profession. 

https://artgallery.uleth.ca/mootookakiossin-creating-in-spacetime-hess-gallery-november-6-december-16-2023/

INTERLOCHIA PART 1

Interlochia is a fantastical tale woven around the figure of a mythical Plague Doctor. Finding himself unemployed after the end of the Great Plague of 1665, he decides to travel to Africa and the Americas in search of new plant remedies. In his quest, he is inspired by the work of real life naturalist, astronomer, illustrator and cartographer, Georg Marcgraf or Marcgrave, whose influential compendium, Natural History of Brazil, (1648) details the flora and fauna of the Pernambuco region of Brazil.

Pernambuco was the centre of a short lived Dutch colony in Brazil, whose Governor General, Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen sought to outline and  capture in art and science all natural life there. The region had a notably high concentration of enslaved Africans, and from 1605-94, was the site of the world’s largest maroon settlement, the Quilombo of Palmares, inhabited primarily by escaped Africans, but also by smaller numbers of indigenous peoples and marginalised Portuguese settlers.

Although an invented word, Interlochia bears comparison with the name Interlochen, meaning between lakes, a tiny settlement in Michigan which was once home to members of the Odawa people. The project will be developed further to explore some of these themes in more detail.

The University of Derby present Our Stories Are Wild, an exhibition which brings together artists and researchers who focus on the human-nature relationship. Many of the artworks and films reveal an emotional and spiritual connection with our environment and explore themes of care, hope and responsibility. Curated by Caroline Locke, Associate Professor of Arts, the exhibition includes over 25 artists and collaborators, many from Derbyshire and the East Midlands. The launch and celebration will take place on Monday 24 June from 18:30 to 20:30, coinciding with the University of Derby’s Nature Connections Conference 2024 ( see details here https://www.derby.ac.uk/events/latest-events/nature-connections-conference-2024/)

The exhibition is free to attend and can be found within the Cathedral building. Please be mindful of opening and service times, which can be found on our Visit page – Visit | Derby Cathedral

For Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals, The Otolith Group invites musicians, non-musicians and noisicians to participate in an event hosted by the free-jazz and improvising vocalist, dancer, and performer, Maggie Nicols.

In the company of sound artists and experimental musicians such as Faradena Afifi, Steve Beresford, Ansuman Biswas, Esi Eshun, Lore Lixenburg and noisicians from the Noisy Peoples Orchestra, Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals invites musicians and non-musicians, vocalists, poets, writers, performance artists, dancers and visual artists to participate in an experiment with improvisation. We ask everyone to bring an instrument or a sound making object, their voice, or to simply join in by listening in to the collective sounding of appeals and resolutions and the resounding of declarations and demands.

Think of Women of the Whole World: A Murmuration of Resolutions and Appeals as an invitation, hosted under the umbrella of the Department of Xenogenesis or DXG, to practice what Maggie Nicols calls ‘social virtuosity’. An invitation that opens the force of sound at a time, now, and a place, here, characterised by the gravity of speech, the threat of silence, the grief of vocality and the rage of assertion.

Included in the event will be a process of recitation, revisiting and reinterpreting passages from the resolutions and appeals printed and distributed by the WIDF between its founding Congress in Paris in November 1945, the Conference of the Women of Asia in Beijing in December 1949 and the World Congress of Women in Moscow in June 1963.

OST exhibition booklet and online zine. Contains essay, The Quiet Object, written in response to a visit to Pitt Rivers Museum archival collections. See pages 4-5 of booklet.

https://figshare.arts.ac.uk/articles/online_resource/_b_OST_zine_b_/25975615?file=46835932

See Introduction and post-performance conversation at the end of

Politics of the Voice: Session 1- The Politics of Vocal Music, Courtisane Festival - 

https://vimeo.com/1012024532

Introduction and post-performance conversation 

Politics of the Voice: Session 2 - The Politics of Voice Poetry

https://vimeo.com/1014458710

Artists Conversation- Reframing Colonial Legacies: a sonic journey from Johannesburg to London

Thu 04 July 2024

12:30 -19:30

RIBA

Commissioned in response to our latest exhibition Raise the Roof: Building for Change it will explore themes such imperialism, race, gender and architecture through sound and discussion.

Following the performance, Sibonelo Gumede and Nombuso Mathibela will be joined by the Raise the Roof artists to discuss current architectural aesthetic practice and education.

You’ll be invited to take part in the discussion and explore the complex histories of colonial architecture including those found within our historic headquarters 66 Portland Place.

https://www.architecture.com/whats-on/reframing-colonial-legacies-a-sonic-journey-from-johannesburg-to-london

How can we change architectural practice to create a more inclusive and equitable future? Designers, architects, historians and creative practitioners come together to debate and shape new ideas to transform urban planning, architecture and the built environment for an afternoon symposium.

https://www.feralpractice.com/sum-tyms-bit/index.php

Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit draws resonance between themes of power, fragility and exploitation in Kent’s landscapes, and the forces at work in Russell Hoban’s cult 1980 novel Riddley Walker. In the post-apocalyptic world of the book, inhabitants of ‘Inland’ (East Kent) mythologise the fragments of a lost civilization destroyed by human ambition.

In 2020 we experienced profound insight into our own vulnerabilities, and the unpredictable consequences of our exploitative relationship with animals and the land. Sum Tyms Bytin Sum Tyms Bit, alive to the climate crisis, global disease vectors, species extinction and postcolonial extraction, explores how humans obliterate and control nonhuman worlds. It probes human sites of power in East Kent, including Faversham’s explosive past, Thanet Earth’s constant day, and the unfathomable nuclear futures of Dungeness. And in adjunct spaces to these behemoths, it finds wild creatures living circumscribed lives, often in isolation from their kind.

Esi Eshun: “The work plays with layers of awareness, where something not quite apprehended rubs up against more conscious evocations of place and meaning.”

https://2023.londonfestivalofarchitecture.org/event/finding-common-ground-touring-finsbury-park

In this talk, I aim to unpack the main threads touched upon within the film, The Vanishment, situating the Jarvis mural’s imperialist ideologies within wider socio-political and eeconomic contexts of the time, revealing, in the process, the extremist nature of the thinking and practices embedded within it.

I will try to counter the vision of settler colonial relations represented within it by offering perspectives into wider colonial contexts, using elements of my personal family history in Ghana/the Gold Coast, to address aspects of architectural networks in the region.

I will focus on Ghanian architecture built in coastal areas from around 1870-1930, showing how the cosmopolitan nature of the large houses built to accommodate extended families, derived from the realities of intercultural exchange at the time. The buildings, borrowing from both European and vernacular styles, and utilising local resources and techniques such as the rammed earth construction method, serve to destabilise continuing assumptions around the nature of power relations in the region, while also paving the way for the later blending and hybridisation of styles/techniques from the 1940s onwards.

Writer and moderator throughout four day experimental music festival based around a speculative meeting between Jean Michel Basquiat and John Cage on the fortieth anniversary of a dual exhibition at the Fruitmarket

This richly illustrated catalogue accompanies Feel the Sound, a landmark exhibition at the Barbican. Bringing together art, science, and sonic innovation, the publication explores how sound shapes our emotional, physical, and social worlds.

Edited by Taous Dahmani and designed by Other Office, the catalogue draws inspiration from the graphic energy and editorial vibrancy of iconic music magazines. Blending scholarly insight with creative experimentation, it presents a dynamic mix of essays, Q&As, poetry, comics, conversations, protocols, scores, and behind-the-scenes material.

Feel the Sound is both a critical resource and a sensory experience—an invitation to tune in, turn up, and listen more closely to the world around us.