The installation will consist of an ‘eternal choir’ created by a series of vocal recordings made on a single tape loop stretched across the project space and running continuously throughout the day (or at least until it finally disintegrates and a new one takes over). Visitors and participants will be invited to listen in then contribute their own voices, the only instruction being that they harmonise with whatever was on the loop before them. Removing the tape machine’s erase head from the equation means that theoretically it should be possible to build up multiple layers of interlocking voices that blend, morph and disintegrate together before your very ears. Although given that this is vintage technology, nothing is ever certain. What we can guarantee is that we’ll create sounds that nobody else has ever made before and we’ll create them together. Both days will culminate in an evening performance featuring all the tape loops that have survived.
A film in collaboration with Ross Adams. Running time: 33 minutes.
This film arises from the fertile bed of Channelsea river, and the mud banks of Channelsea island. After the bend there’s a dead end, an ecotonal community alive with self-seeded inhabitants, effluent overflows, waste waters, mud, industrial detritus, people in search of rest, tidal flow. On the island birch, alder, bramble and buddleia make slow steady progress demolishing the former chemical works buildings, young holly and holm oak forecasting the evergreen future of the land. Light, wind and rain remember their way in.
The sounds have been gathered by Blanc Sceol through their on-going site specific work there. A somatic score creates a space for participation, the field recordings and poems were recorded and written during and after encounters at different times of day and night, hydrophones witness tidal flows, a voice recycles the word ‘waste’ on a tape loop, a waterphone filled with river water and a song slide around one another, and self-created instrument ‘Orbit’ is played inside Abbey Mills pumping station. Ross Adams’ wide-eyed visual reflections circumnavigate the island as a solitary, exploratory flowing eye. This witness reaches around, above, inside and through its contrasting elements – the detritus of the abandoned landscape in conversation with dense new growth.
The film came out of an audio-visual performance collaboration created for the EnCounters x Music and Other Living Creatures series, curated by Helen Frosi and Cafe OTO Projects.
Also on display will be a Tide cloth – calico dyed with river sediment which was created in collaboration with the Channelsea river as part of the Spree~Channelsea Radio Group project 2023, as well as 2 x text scores written for Channelsea Island.
Listening Circle
Session One : 13 April Saturday 4:30pm £10
Session Two : 14 April Sunday 4:30pm £10
£10 | 8 places only each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing
Duration: 75 minutes approximately
Access to the Channelsea river is closed throughout April, in preparation for the final connections to the Tideway tunnel due to be made later this year. As a result of this period of works, the Channelsea will once again be subjected to regular pollution events from the Abbey Mills overflow pipes. Join us to listen in live to the soundscapes of the river via an open microphone situated on the banks, tuning in as a way to be with the contemporary and historical pollution this waterbody has been expected to dilute. The circle will give us space to reflect on current and local ecological concerns through an embodied connection to our own inner waters.
The live stream is part of the live soundmap project operated by Locus Sonus.
£5 | 8 places only each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Running Time : approximately 21 minutes plus 25 minutes performance and discussions
Exercise in Conscious Listening: Maple, 2021
Film. Running time: 10:26
‘Maple is the third instalment in the Conscious Listening series. The performance took place in Tottenham Park Cemetery as part the of Be-coming Tree International Performance Event. These exercises bring attention to the importance of listening and communication in order to un-learn built-in hierarchical modes of relating, and to build a more harmonious relationship with other species. Using non-lingual communication methods, such as touch, sound, and movement, I attempt to tap into the tree’s communication system. Trees use vibrations in their roots in order to send and receive messages through a fungal network linking them underground, by using my voice and limbs, I hope to create vibration patterns that allow me to tap into this wonderful system. The audio is a representation of the conversation which took place during the performance, using manipulated field recordings and vocals.’
2. Infinite Breath, 2022
Film. Running time: 9:37
Infinite Breath is a meditation on the role of the atmosphere within human and other-than-human connections through time and space. The artist wearing her listening device attempts to respond to the sounds and airflow using movement as a communication tool.
It is through the atmosphere, through the act of breathing that we are connected to all things, past, present, and future. Since the dawn of the planet the atmosphere has been a space of circulation for all elements, forms, and beings, “the metaphysical space of their conjunction, the unity of all things, measured by the coincidence of breath.” Coccia (2019)
£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
Running Time : approximately 25 minutes plus discussion with artist about the work
Conversations 2024
A collection of personal moving images and sounds woven together in digital video, with the intention of some kind of non-sense narrative. An attempt to find connections, distortions, patterns, plot, rhythms, cycle, rambling, pulse, unhinged. Conversations series is an ongoing project.
Originally from Singapore, Lynn Loo has been based in London since 2004. She began making films in 1997. Her works include single-screen to multi-projection and installations. She has participated internationally in festivals, galleries and institutes such as Yebisu International Arts Festival in Tokyo, 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival in USA, Art Central Hong Kong, Tate gallery and Cafe Oto in London.
Session Three : 18 February Sunday 5:30 – 6:30pm (Full)
£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
‘I first studied painting and was drawn into film by the possibilities of visual movement.
This show is a chance to develop ideas that began in those student days when I was projecting rhythmic frames of pure colour film onto paintings, and watching the shapes dance about. The DIVFUSE project space will become my first three dimensional canvas on which to try out ideas of colour light on painted surfaces.’ – Guy Sherwin
For the talk, the artist is going to project the original standard 8 film, using a standard 8 projector, onto some of his sketchbooks made in 1970 which were the start of his experiments in colour and film. He will then talk through his journey of arriving to the work that is being displayed today.
‘I have been making films since the early 1970s and these have taken various forms: silent black and white series (Short Film Series); projection onto special screens (Paper Landscape); longer form films (Messages); multi-projection performances with visual sound (Vowels & Consonants – made with Lynn Loo); looped installations (Three Trees).
What links these diverse approaches is the impulse to find out what happens when a new idea is tried out. It’s the process itself that largely determines the direction the work takes.’
£5 | 12 places only | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets
A talk by experienced improviser Caroline Kraabel
Exploring her own practice, along with a wider view of improvisation and identity: even the world of freely improvised music can be experienced as an enclave that excludes, despite the perceived association of improvisation with limitlessness and freedom.
How do people who improvise feel and think DIFFERENTLY from each other on the subject? How do we avoid or alter any dominance of particular groups over the theory or practice of improvisation? Does the experimental nature of improvisation make it easier for members of élites to shine in the field, because they have more pre-existing socio-cultural capital? Or, does improvisation come more easily for outsiders who are already primed to find alternative paths? How are improvisers affected by their musical and cultural histories? How does a group, maybe a large group, of improvisers negotiate space and time, noise and silence in a musical and just way?
For improvisers who have experienced forms of oppression in music making and/or life, is the aim when making music merely to recapitulate existing power structures, but try to place themselves at the top? Or to create new and fairer structures?
References: Gittin’ To Know Y’all: Improvised Music, Interculturalism, and the Racial Imagination, by George E. Lewis, Columbia University
Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender, by Ellen Waterman, University of Guelph
Caroline Kraabel is a London-based improviser, saxophonist, artist, conductor, and composer.
In 2022 Kraabel founded a large improvising group made up of all sorts of women, non-binary, and transgender improvisers: ONe_Orchestra New. (https://oneorchestranew.com/)
